fness of the limbs. Horror succeeds surprise when the signs of
decomposition become visible. The body is concealed under leaves, under
stones heaped up within caverns, and each one wonders with terror
whether that death is an exceptional case, or whether the same fate
awaits every one in a more or less distant future. Deaths become more
numerous as the primitive family grows older, and at last the conviction
comes that it is an inevitable fate. The remembrance of the ancestors,
the apparition of their ghosts in the wonders of dreams, the anxiety as
to the fate of the soul after the destruction of the body, give rise,
along with the presentiment of another life, to the first idea of God.
Death teaches eternity and proves irrefragably the existence of a power
superior to that of man. The belief in metempsychosis, in the migration
of the soul, in other spheres, in reward and punishment according to the
works done by men in the flesh, arose among nations in accordance with
the degree of civilisation which they had attained. Among the least
civilised these doctrines exist in a state of confusion, remain vague,
uncouth, surcharged with superstition and peculiarities. Nevertheless,
everywhere the mystery of the tomb is venerated.

It may be affirmed that no nation was so preoccupied with death as
ancient Egypt. It is a strange sight to behold that people preparing its
tomb from childhood, refusing to yield up its dust to the elements, and
struggling against destruction with invincible obstinacy. Just as the
layers of Nile mud have overlaid one another since the birth of time,
the generations of Egypt are ranged in order at the bottom of the mummy
pits of the hypogea and the pyramids of the necropolis, their bodies
intact--for the worm of the tomb dare not attack them, repelled as it is
by the bitter bituminous odours. But for the sacrilegious devastations
of man, that dead people would be found complete, and its numberless
multitudes might cover the earth. Imagination is staggered when it
attempts to calculate the probable numbers; if Egyptian civilisation had
lasted ten centuries longer, the dead would have ended by expelling the
living from their native land. The necropolis would have invaded the
city, and the stark mummies in their bandages would have stood up by the
wall of the hearth.

You cannot have forgotten the marvellous chapter on "A Bird's-eye view
of Paris," an amazing restoration by a poet, in which archaeology i