e,
and is not desired. The uses to which the Egyptian Pharaohs and their
humbler subjects have been put in these days of indelicacy and
unscrupulousness in the pursuit of science or sordid gain are not such
as to make many eager to be preserved for a similar disposition when the
present shall have become a similarly distant past.

Desiccation, in striking contrast with embalming, is the process of
nature rather than of art, and involves no mutilation and no
substitution of foreign substances for human flesh, and does not by
unnatural means preserve the semblance of the human form so long that a
susceptible sentiment is shocked and a due return of material humanity
to the elements that gave it birth prevented. Desiccation is so far a
natural process that it seems not to have been thought of until nature
had done the work and shown the product, and through many centuries, and
upon an extensive scale, nature had employed the process before it
occurred to man to copy her and adopt her method for the disposition of
his dead.

Wherever the air that enwrapped the lifeless form of man or beast was
dry, desiccation anticipated and prevented decomposition. In deserts,
upon elevated plains, upon the slopes of lofty mountain ranges, to which
the winds that passed their summits bore no moisture, the dead have not
decayed, but have dried undecomposed. In the morgue attached to the
Hospice of St. Bernard, the dead, lifted too late from their shroud of
snow, and borne thither to await the recognition of their friends, dry,
and do not decay. In the "Catacombs" of the monastery of the Capuchins
at Palermo, and in the "Bleikeller" at Bremen, the same phenomenon has
appeared. Even Egypt is a confirmation of these statements, for it is
probable that, had much less care been taken to preserve the dead, they
would not there have yielded to decay as in other lands; and that
moisture is so far absent from the atmosphere that the dead would have
been preserved from decay by desiccation had not embalming been resorted
to. Upon the elevated Western plains of this continent, the bodies of
beasts and men by thousands have been preserved from decomposition by
desiccation. To take one instance out of many that might be cited: A
cave was not long ago discovered high up among the Sierra Madre
Mountains, within which were found, where they had rested undisturbed
for many years, the lifeless figures of a little aboriginal household,
dried and undecayed.