made them avoid
every ground of accusation and every pretext for making war upon
them--yet a Roman having killed a cat, the people rushed to his house,
and neither the entreaties of the grandees, whom the king sent for the
purpose, nor the terror of the Roman name, could protect this man from
punishment, although the act was involuntary. I do not relate this
anecdote," adds the historian, "on the authority of another, for I was
an eye-witness of it during my stay in Egypt."[19]

During their lives, the consecrated cats were fed upon fish, kept for
the purpose in tanks; and "when one of them happened to die," says the
veracious writer just cited, "it was wrapped in linen, and after the
bystanders had beaten themselves on the breast, it was carried to the
Tarichoea, where it was embalmed with coedria and other substances
which have the virtue of embalming bodies, after which it was interred
in the sacred monument." It has puzzled not a little the learned
archaeologists, who have endeavored to discover a profound philosophy
figured and symbolized in the singular mythology of the Egyptians, to
explain how it is that in Thebes, where the sacred character of the cat
was held in the highest reverence, and cherished with the greatest
devotion, not only embalmed cats have been found, but also the bodies of
rats and mice, which had been subjected to the same anti-putrescent
process. If, however, Herodotus is to be credited, the Egyptians owed a
deep debt of gratitude to the mice; for the venerable historian assures
us, and on the unquestionable authority of the Egyptian priests, that
when Sennacherib and his army lay at Pelusium, a mighty corps of
field-mice entered the camp by night, and eating up the quivers,
bowstrings, and buckler-leathers of the Assyrian troops, in this summary
fashion liberated Egypt from the terror of the threatened invasion.
Probably the existence of mice-mummies may be accounted for in this way,
and if--resorting to no violent supposition--we presume in the good work
which the tiny patriots so sagaciously accomplished that their
cousins-german the rats were assistant, the whole matter receives a
satisfactory explanation. The hypothesis, it is submitted, is not
without plausible recommendations on its behalf. There is extant a
fragment of a comedy, entitled "The Cities," written by the Rhodian poet
Anaxandrides, in which the Egyptian worship of animals is amusingly
enough quizzed. A translation will be fo