indestructible, and either migrates into fresh forms, or into fresh spheres of celestial or infernal regions, and is finally absorbed in the great ocean from which it sprang. It is singular that we find almost the precise form of this Egyptian belief among many existing savage or semi-civilized men separated by wide distances in different quarters of the world. The Negroes of the Gold Coast believe in the same three entities, and they call the soul which exists independently of the man, before his birth and after his death, the Kra, a name which is almost identical with the Egyptian Ka. The Navajos and other tribes of Red Indians have precisely the same belief. It seems probable that as we find it in the earliest Egyptian records, it was a development, evolved through ages of growing civilization by a succession of learned priests, from the primitive fetichism and fear of ghosts of rude ancestors; and in the animal worship and other superstitions of later times we find traces of these primitive beliefs still surviving among the mass of the population. Be this as it may, this theory of a future life was firmly rooted at the dawn of Egyptian history, and we are indebted to it, and to the dryness of the climate, for the marvellous preservation of records which give us such an intimate acquaintance with the history, the religion, the literature, and the details of a domestic and social life which is distant from our own by an interval of more than 6000 years. No other nation ever attained to such a vivid and practical belief in a future existence as these ancient Egyptians. Taking merely the material test of money, what an enormous capital must have been expended in pyramids, tombs, and mummies; what a large proportion of his income must every Egyptian of the upper classes have spent in the preparations for a future life; how shadowy and dim does the idea of immortality appear in comparison among the foremost races of the present day! The elevated moral code of the Todtenbuch is another proof of the great antiquity of Egyptian civilization. Morality is a plant of slow growth which has hardly an existence among rude and primitive tribes, and is only slowly evolved either by contact with superior races or by long ages of settled social order. How many centuries did it take before the crude and ferocious ideas of the Hebrew tribes wandering in the desert or warring with the Canaanites, were transformed into the lofty and humane conceptions of the later prophets, of Hillel and of Jesus! And yet we find all the best maxims of this later morality already existing 5000 years before the Sermon on the Mount, in the Sacred Book of ancient Egypt. The prayer of the soul pleading in the day of judgment before Osiris and the Celestial Jury, which embodies the idea of moral perfection entertained by the contemporaries of Menes, contains the following articles--