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those of the ibis. When the late lamented engineer, Mr. Brunel, returned from Egypt, he was kind enough to present me with a fine specimen of a mummy ibis.

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It

was a shapeless, dirty, brown-looking mass, and portions of it crumbled under the fingers. I was nevertheless determined to look

with

inside; So, dissecting scalpel,

scissors, and fine

I

toothed saw, began to dissect it

out. The mummy had evidently been submitted to the action of a slow but powerful heat after

it had been prepared, for, on removing the outer semi-burned bandages, the bird itself was found to be in

IBIS MUMMY EXAMINED BY F. T. BUCKLAND, ESQ.

closed in a solid and hard mass of bituminous substance, i. e. the original embalming material remelted by the subsequent fire. How and when the fire took place, who can say?

A few taps with a chisel caused a large cake of the embalming material to fall off, and underneath it was seen the wing of the bird, the feathers carefully smoothed and properly arranged. For about half-an-hour after their exposure to the air, the shining lustre of these feathers was iridescent, like mother-of-pearl; but this appearance soon vanished. On the under side of the piece broken off were the most beautiful and delicate markings of the structure of the feather—a complete cast, in fact, in bitumen. This substance must have been placed in a very hot and fluid state on the body of the bird, or the impressions would not have been so perfect; they are quite as good as the finest medallion castings in plaster of Paris.

It was for some time difficult to make out anything but the wings, which formed a sort of shroud to the body; but at last, a bit of bone projecting at the end of the mummy gave a hint; the bone was followed up, the wing cut away, and the thigh, leg, foot, and toes, with the scaly skin still on them, exposed (see the figure). Alongside the leg was placed the head, in an exceedingly perfect condition. The bill, six inches long, extended down to the end of the mummy, where it was broken off; the eyes were seen, dry and hard like those of a chicken that was hung a long time in a poulterer's shop; the nostrils were distinctly visible, likewise the large aperture of the ear, telling us that our friend in life could both see, hear, and smell well, and kept good watch and guard when stalking along the muddy banks of the Nile, possibly watching the workmen of Cheops building the great pyramid, or possibly old Herodotus himself climbing up it, note-book in hand; or, could we but know what those eyes have seen, what those ears have heard, we could indeed write a good paper for the Antiquarian or Ethno

logical Societies. If, however, we are ignorant of what ibis saw and heard, we have some clue to what he had for dinner. It has been stated that the scales of a serpent have been found in a mummy ibis. I was not so lucky as to find these, but when chiselling out the neck of the bird, a portion of bitumen gave way, and the contents of the body fell out. Amongst this black mass of shapeless dust, the finger detected something hard; in a few minutes I had picked out some eight or ten little gravel and quartz stones, about the size of turnip seeds or small split peas. How did these stones get there? Not many years ago, an ancient Briton was dug up on the downs, not far from Didcot station, on the Great Western Railway, and in the place where his stomach had once been, was discovered a hard mass of raspberry seed. There was such a matted lump of them, that a medico-antiquarian bystander gave it as his belief that the ancient Briton died of indigestion from eating too many raspberries.* In our ibis we found no seeds, but stones; most birds, and among them the ibis, swallow stones to help the horny coats of their gizzards to grind up their food.

Now, when the embalmer prepared our specimen, he did not take out the gizzard: there it remained till it crumbled into dust; and when the bird was again opened, some three or four thousand years afterwards, at Regent's Park Barracks, out fell the stones. The stones tell us that they had been rolled about by water before the bird swallowed them, and that they had been performing the office of "miller's assistants" for some time, for their edges are further worn down and partially polished by the action of the gizzard. I only wish this ibis had dined shortly before death, and then we might have found some traces of his dinner. He was probably an invalid bird, and had fed only upon "slops," which left no trace behind them.

* Some of these seeds were planted, and grew into fine specimens of the wild raspberry.

I have dissected a second ibis since the specimen I am now describing, and found the same kind of stones; and these particulars may, I think, be fairly adduced to prove that, if we will only listen, we may hear "sermons from stones." We talk of the antiquity of the ibis, and the ancient Egyptians; the stones from this bird's gizzard laugh at us. How far back in the physical history of our planet must we go to know the history of these little fragments of some ancient quartz mountain range, which in all probability witnessed the first rays of the sun as they dispelled the dark and murky clouds of chaos, when this earth was yet young in creation.

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But have we nothing else in the body of our ibis to comment upon? Yes, surely, here are some dozen little beetles, which have fallen out of its body. What will they tell us? They buzz out, "We are well-known insects to dissectors of mummies; our name is Dermestes Pollinetus,' and pollinetus means, prepared for the grave or funeral. We are carrion-eaters, and have near relations in England, called 'ham-hoppers,' which much plague the ham merchants and the leather dealers. We have capital noses for stinking animal substances; and when the ibis in which we were found was being made into a mummy, it was very hot weather, and we smelt him out; the embalmers went away to dinner; we then crawled up into the body of the bird (for they had 'trussed' him, as the modern poulterers call this operation, taking out the intestines and leaving the gizzard only), and while we were eating away, and thinking about laying our eggs, the embalmers returned. They did not know we were inside. They stopped up the hole where we came in with a bit of mummy cloth; we could not get out, and when the bird was dipped into hot pitch, we folded our wings and died. And now here we are, hard and dry, but still perfect, all but our legs, which have got broken off. Ah! it was a sad day for us when we entered the open and bowel-less bird to

get our dinners, and we have been there quite long enough, and are right glad to see the sun again, though the light seems different from the light we have been accustomed to. And you, Mr. Inquisitive, are not like that old, long-bearded, spice-smelling Egyptian embalmer who shut us up in our prison."

But why was our ibis made into a mummy at all? Why did not his captor wring his neck and cook him? Know, then, that the ibis was sacred to the god Thoth, and that Thoth was Mercury of the Romans. It has been remarked (as you may remark tomorrow in the Zoological Gardens), that when this bird, like the robin of nursery fame,

“Tucks his head under his wing, poor thing,"

he has some resemblance to the heart. The Egyptians believed that the heart was the seat of intellect; (so do the valentine writers of the present day ;) both seem to have ignored, and still do ignore, the brain and its mysterious nerve batteries, the head-quarters of the intellect, whether we write about mummies, or whether we think about our lady loves. However, as the bird resembled the heart, he was, in the mythology of the time, promoted to a high office, viz. to "preside over and inspire all the sacred and mystical learning of the Egyptian hierarchy;" and if they built mechanics' institutes in those days, they most likely put the figure of an ibis over the door, and not the bust of Minerva, as we do in the present day. Others think that ibis was considered sacred because he destroyed snakes and reptiles. I doubt it. He was much like a common curlew in shape and habits, and though he might snap at a good fat frog, he would not probably notice a snake. Anyhow, the Egyptian ibis family of the present day will not even look at a snake, for I have tried the living birds at the Zoological Gardens with a snake, and instead of making a meal of the unfortunate reptile forthwith, the ibis hopped and shuffled away from it in a

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