It has been a custom among ancient nations to preserve the bodies of the dead for a long period of time. Even to this day we find traces of it in the mummies of Egypt and the sarcophagi of Etruria. Their method of achieving this result may not have been strictly in accordance with the principles of modern science; certainly their success would hardly be satisfactory to the more refined taste of our generation. Still their discoveries in this art have been such that they have commanded the respect of modern savants. They also show conclusively that the sciences of chemistry and physiology, even at that remote period, had attained a certain degree of prominence among their scientific men. Many of their discoveries were no doubt accidental, still we must give them credit for the spirit of investigation which actuated their researches, and carried them on undaunted through the many disappointments they must certainly have encountered before they satisfactorily solved the problem. The imagination is carried back to the time when the mysterious worship of Osiris and Isis was flourishing on the banks of the river Nile, when the Sphinx uttered, or was thought to utter, the sacred oracles of Thormes, and before the pyramids had entombed a long generation of kings. A great number of persons cannot revert to the science of embalming without placing it among the lost arts; to them a mummy is the contemporary of a mysterious past dimly perceived through the long vista of succeeding generations; a tangible proof of that much vaunted ancient civilization, which as they express regretfully will never be found again. A thorough elimination of the subject would convince those unsophisticated mourners that the loss is not quite an irreparable one. Let us divest a mummy of his bitumen-coated and fire-scorched bandages; we will then have before us a mass of blackened and hardened cement-like substance, shrunken and emaciated to almost a skeleton, and bearing semblance to the form of a human organism, only so far as the shape of the osseous frame has retained its symmetry. The lips have shrunk apart so far as to expose the row of white teeth, the sockets of the eyes are empty, the cheek bones are prominent, the whole covered with patches of the dark and almost petrified epidermis. Such is the picture a mummy presents to our view when denuded of its envelope