There is, however, a very widespread feeling against any meddling with the dead. A sentiment which has a large part of its origin in the belief that the spirits of the departed have still some use for their bodies forbids one to disturb the bones which have been committed to the earth. There is the fear lest the disturbing of the dead should offend the susceptibilities of the living members of the family to which the deceased belonged. A body from which the life has gone assumes, also, a sanctity derived from the mystery of death. It has passed beyond the sphere of our understanding. The limbs which in life were apparently independent of Heaven have suddenly fallen back upon God, and are become the property of the Infinite. A corpse represents the total collapse of our expediencies, the absolute paralysis of our systems and devices; and thus, as the incitement to the mental search for the permanency which must somewhere exist, the lifeless bones become consecrate. The question, however, is a somewhat different one in the case of the embalmed bodies of the ancient Egyptians. No modern family traces its descent back to the days of the Pharaohs; and the mummies which are found in the old tombs, although often those of historical characters, and therefore in a special sense the property of the Egyptian nation, compel the family consideration of no particular group of persons. Like other antique objects, they fall under the care of the Department of Antiquities, which acts on behalf of the people of Egypt and the scientists of the world. They have been such æons dead that they no longer suggest the fact of death; like statues, they seem never to have been alive. It is with an effort that in the imagination one puts motion into the stiff limbs, and thoughts into the hard, brown skulls. They have lost to a great extent that awful sanctity which more recent bones possess, for the soul has been so long departed from them that even the recollection of its presence is forgotten. People who would be terrified to pass the night in a churchyard will sleep peacefully in an ancient Egyptian necropolis camped amidst the tombs.