fectly recognizable. "It would seem," says the professors of the museum at Paris, in their report on these valuable remains[1], "as if the superstition of the ancient Egyptians had been inspired by Nature, in order to transmit to future times a monument of her history. By embalming with so much care the brutes which were the objects of their foolish adoration, that extraordinary and capricious people have left us, in their sacred grottoes, almost complete cabinets of zoology. The climate has conspired with the art of embalming to preserve bodies from corruption, and we can now satisfy ourselves, by our own eyes, what was the condition of many species three thousand years ago. It is difficult to restrain the transports of our imagination, when we behold thus preserved, with their minutest bones, the smallest portions of their skin, and in every respect most perfectly recognizable, many animals, which at Thebes or Memphis, two or three thousand years ago, had their own priests and altars." In regard to these curious relicts, Lamarck was forced to admit that they were identical with their living descendants in the same country, and accounted for it by saying that this happened because the climate and other physical conditions of the latter had long continued unaltered. But he makes no attempt to account for the fact which is so fatal to his theory, that these remains entirely correspond to individuals of the same species in many different quarters of the globe, where the physical conditions are so dis-
- ↑ Ann. du Museum d'Hist. Nat., tom. i. p. 234.
