II, pp. 682 and 683.]

[127: _Op. cit._ p. 684.]

[128: _Ibid._]

[129: See J. Wilfrid Jackson, _op. cit. supra_.]

Summary.

In these pages I have ranged over a very wide field of speculation,
groping in the dim shadows of the early history of civilization. I have
been attempting to pick up a few of the threads which ultimately became
woven into the texture of human beliefs and aspirations, and to suggest
that the practice of mummification was the woof around which the web of
civilization was intimately intertwined.

I have already explained how closely that practice was related to the
origin and development of architecture, which Professor Lethaby has
called the "matrix of civilization," and how nearly the ideas that grew
up in explanation and in justification of the ritual of embalming were
affected by the practice of agriculture, the second great pillar of
support for the edifice of civilization. It has also been shown how
far-reaching was the influence exerted by the needs of the embalmer,
which impelled men, probably for the first time in history, to plan and
carry out great expeditions by sea and land to obtain the necessary
resins and the balsams, the wood and the spices. Incidentally also in
course of time the practice of mummification came to exert a profound
effect upon the means for the acquisition of a knowledge of medicine and
all the sciences ancillary to it.

But I have devoted chief attention to the bearing of the ideas which
developed out of the practice and ritual of embalming upon the spirit of
man. It gave shape and substance to the belief in a future life; it was
perhaps the most important factor in the development of a definite
conception of the gods: it laid the foundation of the ideas which
subsequently were built up into a theory of the soul: in fact, it was
intimately connected with the birth of all those ideals and aspirations
which are now included in the conception of religious belief and ritual.
A multitude of other trains of thought were started amidst the
intellectual ferment of the formulation of the earliest concrete system
of biological theory. The idea of the properties and functions of water
which had previously sprung up in connexion with the development of
agriculture became crystallized into a more definite form as the result
of the development of mummification, and this has played an obtrusive
part in religion, in philosophy and in medicine ever since. Moreover its
in