[The Egyptians seem to have preferred to use flint instruments for surgical purposes, at any rate for the opening of bodies and for circumcision.  Many flint instruments have been found and preserved in museums.]

fixed into a wooden handle, which he had just been using, in the folds of his robe-as a school-boy might hide some forbidden game from his master.  Then he crossed his arms, to give himself the aspect of a man who is dreaming in harmless idleness.

The solitary lamp, which was fixed on a high stand near his chair, shed a scanty light, which, however, sufficed to show him his trusted friend Pentaur, who had disturbed Nebsecht in his prohibited occupations.  Nebsecht nodded to him as he entered, and, when he had seen who it was, said: 

“You need not have frightened me so!” Then he drew out from under the table the object he had hidden—­a living rabbit fastened down to a board-and continued his interrupted observations on the body, which he had opened and fastened back with wooden pins while the heart continued to beat.

He took no further notice of Pentaur, who for some time silently watched the investigator; then he laid his hand on his shoulder and said: 

“Lock your door more carefully, when you are busy with forbidden things.”

“They took—­they took away the bar of the door lately,” stammered the naturalist, “when they caught me dissecting the hand of the forger Ptahmes.”—­[The law sentenced forgers to lose a hand.]

“The mummy of the poor man will find its right hand wanting,” answered the poet.

“He will not want it out there.”

“Did you bury the least bit of an image in his grave?”

[Small statuettes, placed in graves to help the dead in the work performed in the under-world.  They have axes and ploughs in their hands, and seed-bags on their backs.  The sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead is inscribed on nearly all.]

“Nonsense.”

“You go very far, Nebsecht, and are not foreseeing, ’He who needlessly hurts an innocent animal shall be served in the same way by the spirits of the netherworld,’ says the law; but I see what you will say.  You hold it lawful to put a beast to pain, when you can thereby increase that knowledge by which you alleviate the sufferings of man, and enrich—­”

“And do not you?”

A gentle smile passed over Pentaur’s face; leaned over the animal and said: 

“How curious! the little beast still lives and breathes; a man would have long been dead under such treatment.  His organism is perhaps of a more precious, subtle, and so more fragile nature?”

Nebsecht shrugged his shoulders.

“Perhaps!” he said.

“I thought you must know.”

“I—­how should I?” asked the leech.  “I have told you—­they would not even let me try to find out how the hand of a forger moves.”

“Consider, the scripture tells us the passage of the soul depends on the preservation of the body.”