Mundane Egg) was Egyptian rather than Jewish, Persian, or Hindustanee." "No serpents found in the hieroglyphics bear, so far as I can perceive, any direct relation to the Ouine Myth, nor have Egyptian Eggs any direct connection with the Cosmogonical Serpent. The egg, under certain conditions, seems to denote the idea of a human body. It is also used as a phonetic sign =S=, and when combined with =T=, is the determinative of the feminine gender; in which sense exclusively it is sometimes placed close to a serpent in hieroglyphical legends." "My doubts apply in attempting to give a specific answer to your specific question; _i.e._, the direct connection, in Egyptian Mythology, of the Serpent and the Cosmogonical Egg. In the "Book of the Dead," according to a MS. translation favoured me by the erudite Egyptologist, Mr. Birch, of the British Museum, allusion is made to the "great mundane egg" addressed by the deceased, which seems to refer to the winds or the atmosphere--again the deceased exclaims 'I have raised myself up in the form of the great Hawk which comes out of the Egg (_i.e._, the Sun).' "I do not here perceive any immediate allusion to the duplex emblem of the egg combined with the serpent, the subject of your query. "Yet a reservation must be made in behalf of your very consistent hypothesis--supported, as I allow, by all oriental and classical authority, if not possibly by the Egyptian documents yet undeciphered--which hypothesis is Euclidean. 'Things which are equal to the same are equal to one another.' Now if the 'Mundane Egg' be in the papyric rituals the equivalent to Sun and that by other hieroglyphical texts we prove the Sun to be, in Egypt as elsewhere, symbolized by the figure of a Serpent, does not the 'ultima ratio' resolve both emblems into one? Your grasp of this Old and New World Question renders it superfluous that I should now posit the syllogism. I content myself by referring you to the best of authorities. One point alone is what I would venture to suggest to your philosophical acumen, in respect to ancient 'parallelisms' between the metaphysical conceptions of radically distinct nations (if you please 'species' of mankind, at geographically different centres of _origins_, compelled of necessity in ages anterior to alphabetical record to express their ideas by pictures, figurative or symbolical). It is that man's mind has always conceived, everywhere in the same method, everything that relates to him; because the inability, in which his intelligence is circumscribed, to figure to his mind's eye existence distinct from his own, constrains him to devolve, in the pictorial or sculptural delineation of his thoughts, within the same circle of ideas; and, ergo, the figurative representative of his ideas must ever be, in all ages and countries, the reflex of the same hypotheses, material or physical. May not the emblem of the Serpent and Egg, as well in the New as in the Old