It is a delusion to imagine that embalming is a lost art; that, like
some other marvels of the ancient time, this is a secret process that
perished with the people who employed it. Did we desire it, we could
embalm our princes and our priests, and retain their shrunken
similitudes for distant coming times to gaze and gape upon, as skilfully
as they who practised this art in Egypt's palmiest days. Nay, it is
doubtless far within the truth to claim that better than they did we
could do; and we are actually apprised of better methods and results
than they employed or could attain, and it is not unlikely that we
shall hear of better methods still. But Egypt's method, or its modern
counterpart, will hardly now be popular. It involves too much mutilation
and too much transformation. When it has done its work little is left
but bone and muscular tissue, and these are so transfused with foreign
substances that a form moulded from plastic matter or sculptured from
stone could almost as truly be considered that of the lamented dead as
this. Moreover, indefinite preservation of the dead is not desirable,
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.
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