(M133) In recent years the historical reality of Osiris as a king who once lived and reigned in Egypt has been maintained by more than one learned scholar;(425) and without venturing to pronounce a decided opinion on so obscure and difficult a question, I think it worth while, following the example of Dr. Wallis Budge, to indicate certain modern African analogies which tend to confirm the view that beneath the mythical wrappings of Osiris there lay the mummy of a dead man. At all events the analogies which I shall cite suffice to prove that the custom of worshipping dead kings has not been confined to Egypt, but has been apparently widespread throughout Africa, though the evidence now at our disposal only enables us to detect the observance of the custom at a few points of the great continent. But even if the resemblance in this respect between ancient Egypt and modern Africa should be regarded as established, it would not justify us in inferring an ethnical affinity between the fair or ruddy Egyptians and the black aboriginal races who occupy almost the whole of Africa except a comparatively narrow fringe on the northern sea-board. Scholars are still divided on the question of the original home and racial relationship of the ancient Egyptians. It has been held on the one hand that they belong to an indigenous white race which has been always in possession of the Mediterranean coasts of Africa; and on the other hand it has been supposed that they are akin to the Semites in blood as well as in language, and that they entered Africa from the East, whether by gradual infiltration or on a sudden wave of conquest like the Arabs in the decline of the Roman empire.(426) On either view a great gulf divided them from the swarthy natives of the Sudan, with whom they were always in contact on their southern border; and though a certain admixture may have taken place through marriage between the two races, it seems unsafe to assume that the religious and political resemblances which can be traced between them are based on any closer relationship than the general similarity in structure and functions of the human mind.