It will probably be admitted that nothing in this sacred story would seem out of place if we found it in the legends of Pund-jel, or Cagn, or Yehl, among Australians, Bushmen, or Utes, whose own "culture-hero," like the ghost of Osiris, was a wolf. This dismembering of Osiris in particular resembles the dismembering of many other heroes in American myth; for example, of Chokanipok, out of whom were made vines and flint-stones. Objects in the mineral and vegetable world were explained in Egypt as transformed parts or humours of Osiris, Typhon and other heroes.*** * Wicked squires in Shropshire (Miss Burns, Shropshire Folk- Lore) "come" as bulls. Osiris, in the Mendes nonie, "came" as a ram (Marietta, Denderah, iv. 75). ** De Is, et Os., xx. ***Magical Text, nineteenth dynasty, translated by Dr. Birch Records of Past vi. 115; Lefebure, Osiris, pp. 100, 113,124, 205; Livre des Morts chap. xvii.; Records of Past, x. 84. Once more, though the Egyptian gods are buried here and are immortal in heaven, they have also, like the heroes of Eskimos and Australians and Indians of the Amazon, been transformed into stars, and the priests could tell which star was Osiris, which was Isis, and which was Typhon.* Such are the wild inconsistencies which Egyptian religion shares with the fables of the lowest races. In view of these facts it is difficult to agree with Brugsch** that "from the root and trunk of a pure conception of deity spring the boughs and twigs of a tree of myth, whose leaves spread into a rank impenetrable luxuriance ". Stories like the Osiris myth--stories found all over the whole world--spring from no pure religious source, but embody the delusions and fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed human fancy and human speculation. And these flourish, like mistletoe on the oak, over the sturdier growth of a religious conception of another root. The references to the myth in papyri and on the monuments, though obscure and fragmentary, confirm the narrative of the _De Iside_. The coffer in which Osiris foolishly ventured himself seems to be alluded to in the Harris magical papyrus.*** "Get made for me a shrine of eight cubits. Then it was told to thee, O man of seven cubits, How canst thou enter it? And it had been made for thee, and thou hast reposed in it." * Custom and Myth, "Star Myths"; De Rouge, Nouv. Not., p. 197; Lefebure, Osiris, p. 213. ** Religion und Mythologie, p. 99. *** Records of Past, x. 154.