is crowded; and, with patience, the visitor may glean from an examination of its contents a vivid general idea of the arts and social comforts of the ancient people who built the Pyramids, and were in the height of their prosperity centuries before the Christian era.  The cases are so divided and sub-divided that it is only by paying particular attention to the numbers marked upon them that the visitor can hope to follow our directions with ease.  He will see, however, on first entering the room, that the mummies are placed in cases occupying the central space of the room; and that huge and gaudily painted coffins, having a somewhat ghastly effect, are placed perpendicularly here and there on the top of the wall cases.  But the attention of the visitor on entering this room is usually rivetted at once upon the human remains of people that flourished more than two thousand years before our era.  The first thought that rises in the mind of the spectator on beholding these wrecks of the human form, is,—­why all this trouble, these bandages, these scents, and these ornaments?  It is as well, therefore, to explain that the ancient Egyptians believed that there would be a resurrection of the body hereafter.  They believed that these poor mummies would issue from these waxen bandages, and once more walk and talk as of old; hence their gigantic excavations at Thebes for secure tombs; hence the great Pyramids built to preserve the sacred forms of their Pharaohs.  Some of the ancient Egyptians retained the embalmed bodies of their relations in their houses, enclosed in coffins, upon which the face of the deceased was faithfully pourtrayed.  Some specimens of these representations are in the room, and some in the Egyptian saloon below.  The mummies of the poorer classes were not so well preserved as those of the rich; therefore, remains of the plebs have crumbled to dust, while those of the sacerdotal class, having been deprived of the intestines, and the brain having been drawn through the nose, having been filled with myrrh, cassia, &c., soaked in natron,[7] and then securely bandaged, have remained in a comparatively sound state to the present time, and may be found in every museum of any note.

Human mummies.

The first five cases to which the visitor would do well to direct his attention are those marked from 46 to 50.  In the first division is deposited the mummy of a female, with a gilt mask over the head and an oskh or collar about the neck; and mummies of children, and fragments of coffins, with paintings of Egyptian deities upon them.  In the second division of the cases, lies some of the kingly dust of the builder of the third pyramid, King Mencheres; also, part of his coffin; the sides of a coffin decorated with drawings of deities; clumps of mummied hair; and mummies of children.  In the third division are tesserae from Egyptian mummies of the Grecian period, with various figures, including one of Anubis, the