purpose, nor the terror of the Roman name, could protect this man from punishment, although the act was involuntary. I do not relate this anecdote," adds the historian, "on the authority of another, for I was an eye-witness of it during my stay in Egypt."[19] During their lives, the consecrated cats were fed upon fish, kept for the purpose in tanks; and "when one of them happened to die," says the veracious writer just cited, "it was wrapped in linen, and after the bystanders had beaten themselves on the breast, it was carried to the Tarichoea, where it was embalmed with coedria and other substances which have the virtue of embalming bodies, after which it was interred in the sacred monument." It has puzzled not a little the learned archaeologists, who have endeavored to discover a profound philosophy figured and symbolized in the singular mythology of the Egyptians, to explain how it is that in Thebes, where the sacred character of the cat was held in the highest reverence, and cherished with the greatest devotion, not only embalmed cats have been found, but also the bodies of rats and mice, which had been subjected to the same anti-putrescent process. If, however, Herodotus is to be credited, the Egyptians owed a deep debt of gratitude to the mice; for the venerable historian assures us, and on the unquestionable authority of the Egyptian priests, that when Sennacherib and his army lay at Pelusium, a mighty corps of field-mice entered the camp by night, and eating up the quivers, bowstrings, and buckler-leathers of the Assyrian troops, in this summary fashion liberated Egypt from the terror of the threatened invasion. Probably the existence of mice-mummies may be accounted for in this way, and if--resorting to no violent supposition--we presume in the good work which the tiny patriots so sagaciously accomplished that their cousins-german the rats were assistant, the whole matter receives a satisfactory explanation. The hypothesis, it is submitted, is not without plausible recommendations on its behalf. There is extant a fragment of a comedy, entitled "The Cities," written by the Rhodian poet Anaxandrides, in which the Egyptian worship of animals is amusingly enough quizzed. A translation will be found in Dr. Prichard's _Analysis of Egyptian Mythology_. The lines referring to cat-worship are as follows: "You cry and wail whene'er ye spy a cat, Starving or sick; I count it not a sin To hang it up, and flay it for its skin;" from which it appears this gay free-thinker was not only somewhat skeptical in his religious notions, but, moreover, a hard-hearted, good-for-nothing fellow--one who, had he lived in our time, would unquestionably have brought himself within the sweep of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Duke of Beaufort's Humanity Act.