A history of soap would be very interesting. Who invented it? When and where did it first come into common use? How did our remote ancestors wash themselves before soap was invented? These are historical questions that naturally arise at first contemplation of the subject; but, as far as we are aware, historians have failed to answer them. We read a great deal in ancient histories about anointing with oil and the use of various cosmetics for the skin, but nothing about soap. These ancients must have been very greasy people, and I suspect that they washed themselves pretty nearly in the same way as modern engine-drivers clean their fingers, by wiping off the oil with a bit of cotton-waste. We are taught to believe that the ancient Romans wrapped themselves round with togas of ample dimensions, and that these togas were white. Now, such togas, after encasing such anointed oily skins, must have become very greasy. How did the Roman laundresses or launders—historians do not indicate their sex—remove this grease? Historians are also silent on this subject. A great many curious things were found buried under the cinders of Vesuvius in Pompeii, and sealed up in the lava that flowed over Herculaneum. Bread, wine, fruits, and other domestic articles, including several luxuries of the toilet, such as pomades or pomade-pots, and rouge for painting ladies’ faces, but no soap for washing them. In the British Museum is a large variety of household requirements found in the pyramids of Egypt, but there is no soap, and we have not heard of any having been discovered there. Finding no traces of soap among the Romans, Greeks, or Egyptians, we need not go back to the pre-historic “cave men,” whose flint and bone implements were found embedded side by side with the remains of the mammoth bear and hyena in such caverns as that at Torquay, where Mr. Pengelly has, during the last eighteen years, so industriously explored. All our knowledge, and that still larger quantity, our ignorance, of the habits of antique savages, indicate that solid soap, such as we commonly use, is a comparatively modern luxury; but it does not follow that they had no substitute. To learn what that substitute may probably have been we may observe the habits of modern savages, or primitive people at home and abroad.