If your correspondent C. G., or any of your readers, can, either from their reading or from local knowledge, add any further illustrations or examples of this ancient heathen word, I, for one, shall receive them gratefully. I. E. Oxford. * * * * * MUMMIES OF ECCLESIASTICS. (Vol. vi., pp. 53. 110. 205. 328.) Although I have myself seen the natural mummies preserved at Kreuzberg on the Rhine, I can say nothing more with regard to them, than vouch for the accuracy of the accounts transmitted by your various correspondents under this head. Your Querist A. A. however may, if curious on this subject, be referred with advantage to Mr. T. J. Pettigrew's interesting _History of Egyptian Mummies_. In chap. xvii. of this work, many instances are adduced of the preservation of bodies from putrefaction by the desiccating properties of the natural air of the place in which they are contained. He says: "In dry, and particularly calcareous vaults, bodies may be preserved for a great length of time. In Toulouse, bodies are to be seen quite perfect, although buried two centuries ago. In the vaults of St. Michael's Church, Dublin, the same effect is produced; and Mr. Madden says he there saw the body of Henry Shears, who was hanged in 1798, in a state of preservation equal to that of any Egyptian mummy." Garcilasso de la Veya, and more recent historians, may be referred to for accounts of the mummy-pits of Peru, the dry air of which country is an effectual preventive of the process of putrefaction. One of the most curious spectacles, however, of this nature is to be found in the Catacombs of Palermo, where the traveller finds himself in the midst of some thousands of unburied bodies, which, suspended mostly by the neck, have become so distorted in form and feature in the process of desiccation, as to provoke an irrepressible smile in the midst of more solemn and befitting contemplations. (Sonnini's _Travels_, vol. i. p. 47.; Smyth's _Memoirs of Sicily and its Islands_, p. 88.) Similar properties are also attributed to the air of the western islands of Scotland. "To return to our purpose," says P. Camerarius (_The Living Librarie_, translated by Molle, folio, London, 1625, p. 47.),--