THE MUMMY CATS OF BENI HASSAN.
A CURIOUS consignment of goods was received at London a few weeks ago, consisting of no less than 180,000 mummy cats from Egypt. These cats have lain in their sacred burial-place at Beni Hassan for 3,000 years or more, and after having fulfilled for so many centuries the destiny intended for them, have at last, under the impulse of nineteenth-century progress, been sacrificed upon the altar of "utility"—that modern all-devouring ogre. These mummies are now about to fill their final function of fertilizing English farm land. The English farmers are indebted for this excellent lot of twenty tons of manure to the lucky accident which befell an Egyptian who, while digging, fell into a pit, which proved to be a subterranean cave completely filled with mummy cats, each one being separately embalmed and wrapped up after the usual fashion of Egyptian mummies. Pussy of B. C. 2,000 was a sacred object to a section of the ancient Egyptians, and when a cat died—as even a cat eventually must—it was buried with as much honor as any human being. The finder having reported his discovery, laborers were soon at work, and turned out tens of thousands of the mummies. Some were taken by the farmers of the place, others went to a merchant in Alexandria, who shipped them to Liverpool, where another merchant, a local fertilizer, bought the consignment at £3 13s. 9d. a ton. The auctioneer, adding insult to injury, knocked down the lot of 180,000 cats with the head of one them as a hammer. To such base uses have the gods of Egypt come!—Scientific American.