to be about twelve hundred years old.  Above various cases are placed mummy coffins, and figures of deities too large for the cases; but the mummy-case deposited over case 31 is worth special attention.  It is scooped out of the trunk of a tree, has the face painted black, a vulture on the chest, and other ornaments and symbols.  Near it, over cases 30-32, are deposited four sepulchral vases of a military officer, containing the parts removed from the body in the process of embalming.  Each vase was sacred to a deity; the first, containing the stomach and appendages, was sacred to Amset the first genius of the dead; the second, containing the lesser intestines, was presided over by the second genius of the dead, Hapi; the lungs and heart, deposited in the third vase, were sacred to Siumutf, the third genius; and to the fourth genius the vase containing the liver and gall-bladder was dedicated.

The visitor having noticed these objects has done with the Egyptian room.  It is well, however, to pause upon the threshold, and before dismissing these interesting glimpses into the life, long since scattered as dust, upon the soil of Egypt, to call to mind the prominent points of the impressive story that may be read in the room he is about to quit.  He may wander back through the histories of ages upon ages; pause before the revelations of Herodotus; and recall the mighty romances of Homer; and, pausing even there, where all is so dim, and little understood, turn once more to these fragmentary monuments of a civilisation that existed even centuries before the great Greek poet.  So silently, for us of the present hour, time rolled by in those days, that we fail to grasp the measure of the distance which separates our fret and toil of the nineteenth century, from that busy valley of the Nile; when the second Rameses reigned in all his glory; when precise artists were ruling geometrical lines upon stones to make their careful drawings; and painters, with their palm-fibre brushes, all unconscious of the critics that lay yet silently in the womb of time, who would shovel the dust and dirt of centuries from before their works, and tell the story of Rameses from these rude revelations.  Curious thoughts crowd in every busy brain, before these strange relics.  Lost in the depths of the past, the mind, with a leap, often grasps at the future; and men will be found seriously saying to themselves, as they notice how we depend for our knowledge of ancient Egyptian fabrics upon the shrouds of ancient Egyptians,—­what, if we looked forward, and in the remote centuries that are rolling toward us, see all our vast and busy Lancashire some layers underground, and archaeologists busy with our winding sheet!  Well, at the least, these thoughts are not idle.  It does all of us good to think often of what has been, and to dream of the future to which we are driving “down the ringing grooves of time”—­to think sometimes of the fine people who had their glorious days, when London was distributed, untouched by human hands, in clayey strata, and remote stone quarries; and hereabouts, to the minds of the Greeks, lay the islands of the blessed.