The climate has conspired with the art of
embalming to preserve the bodies from corruption, and we can now assure
ourselves by our own eyes what was the state of a great number of
species three thousand years ago. We can scarcely restrain the
transports of our imagination, on beholding thus preserved, with their
minutest bones, with the smallest portions of their skin, and in every
particular most perfectly recognizable, many an animal, which at Thebes
or Memphis, two or three thousand years ago, had its own priests and
altars."[808]

Among the Egyptian mummies thus procured were not only those of numerous
wild quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles; but what was perhaps of still
higher importance in deciding the great question under discussion, there
were the mummies of domestic animals, among which those above mentioned,
the bull, the dog, and the cat, were frequent. Now, such was the
conformity of the whole of these species to those now living, that there
was no more difference, says Cuvier, between them than between the human
mummies and the embalmed bodies of men of the present day. Yet some of
these animals have since that period been transported by man to almost
every climate, and forced to accommodate their habits to the greatest
variety of circumstances. The cat, for example, has been carried over
the whole earth, and within the last three centuries, has been
naturalized in every part of the new world,--from the cold regions of
Canada to the tropical plains of Guiana; yet it has scarcely undergone
any perceptible mutation, and is still the same animal which was held
sacred by the Egyptians.

Of the ox, undoubtedly, there are many very distinct races; but the bull
Apis, which was led in solemn processions by the Egyptian priests, did
not differ from some of those now living. The black cattle that have run
wild in America, where there were many peculiarities in the climate not
to be found, perhaps, in any part of the old world, and where scarcely a
single plant on which they fed was of precisely the same species,
instead of altering their form and habits, have actually reverted to the
exact likeness of the aboriginal wild cattle of Europe.

In answer to the arguments drawn from the Egyptian mummies, Lamarck said
they were identical with their living descendants in the same country,
because the climate and physical geography of the banks of the Nile have
remained unaltered for the last thirty centuries. But why, it ma