crust.  In this very Museum, which the visitor now treads—­in these cases of fossil bones which in themselves are common material enough, the lordly intellect that has traced their deep significance, proves that, of all animal types, man is the highest and the strongest—­removed from the most powerful mammoth and megatherium—­the bones of which he has re-fixed, that they may, as stones, tell the story of their wonderful characters when alive.  A curious resurrection this, by Cuvier and others, of long ages ago, to be pondered well.  Not a holiday matter, to be stared at—­an hour’s wonder—­and then forgotten, as of no value in the markets of the living world; but a great and a serious science, with more romances in it than shelves of novels.  To know something of the early state of the world which we enjoy—­to have some evidences given to us that before human animals began to play their part here, wonderful monsters, part mammalia, part birds, part reptiles, gambolled upon the scene; that wingless birds stalked upon marshy grounds; that strange and ghastly lizards crawled upon our fruitful Kent; and gigantic fish floated in our tranquil waters, but no beautiful humming birds, majestic lions, and graceful horses—­only crawling and swimming life, everywhere preying, and the early sea-weed rising in the sea because the polypus wanted its food:  to think of these things is to have some knowledge.  In these dim regions of the past, what glimpses are there of the great eternal laws, the natural progresses, the continual upward tendency of all things!  And then, taking this revealed book of the past in his hand, how a man may sit and ponder on all that is to be—­dream of times when some future geological hammer will be rapping at the clay about the stone relics of his bones, and a man will gaze upon his hardened anatomy with a mild and holy joy—­when all that breathes and moves to-day will be entombed in ancient strata of the earth, and busy life will be carried on a hundred feet above the ruins of the present.  These thoughts dwell happily with good men.

Hence, proceeding on his way, the visitor returns east from the sixth room into the fifth, and turns thence south, into the passage which leads into the western gallery of the Museum, and immediately into

The Egyptian room.

This room is always an attractive part of the Museum to the majority of visitors.  Here are arranged illustrative specimens of the arts and customs of people who lived two thousand years before our era; and the preserved bodies of men and women who trod the streets of Thebes and Memphis, partakers of an advanced civilisation, when the inhabitants of Europe were roaming about uncultivated wastes, in a state of barbarism.  Here are graceful household vessels, compared with the art of which the willow pattern of the nineteenth century is a barbarism, and fabrics of which modern Manchester would not be ashamed.  Into this room a vast collection of Egyptian curiosities