tail is altogether wanting. The young are two or three years old before they assume the adult plumage, a circumstance that has led to the erroneous multiplication of species. During the breeding season, not a few of the grebes have the head ornamented with beautiful tufts, or frills of silky feathers, which produce a very elegant appearance; these they lose in the autumn: the horned grebe, the crested grebe, the eared grebe, &c., take their distinctive names from the character and position of these plumes. The generic characters consist in the bill being straight, compressed, and elongated into a sharp point: the nostrils oblong; the tarsi placed far backward, and very compressed; the feet consisting of three toes before, which are lobated, the external being the longest, and of a hind toe, small, and also lobated. The tail is absolutely wanting; the wings are short and concave.

The crested grebe is mentioned in the 'Fauna Boreali-Americana' as having been killed by Dr. Richardson upon the Saskatshewan.

The colour of the adult, in full plumage, is as follows:-Crown of the head and long occipital tufts, as well as the edges of the neck-frill, glossy greyish black; upper part of the neck-frill, pale chesnut; fore part of the neck and under parts, lustrous silvery white; upper surface deep, glossy, blackish brown, with a white band on the wings; bill, dull red at the base; legs, lead colour on the outer side, and on the inside pale yellow.

The young, which was formerly called the tippet grebe, from the use to which the silky feathers of the under parts were often applied, has the cheeks and throat white, without any tufts or frill,

THE IBIS.

BIRD MUMMIES.

BY THE AUTHOR OF CURIOSITIES OF NATURAL HISTORY.'

We know that the Egyptians made their cats into mummies. I now give a list of the other creatures which were equally honoured, and which will give an idea to what an extent they carried this practice. Mummies have been discovered of the lion, wolf, dog, jackal, fox, hyena, bear, ichneumon, shrew-mouse, deer, goat, ram, sheep, lamb, bull, hippopotamus, and monkey. Among birds, the vulture, eagle, falcon, hawk, owl, and ibis (found particularly at Hermopolis), goose, and swallow. Of the amphibia, crocodile, toad, lizard, &c.; among fish, carp, pike, &c.; insects, principally the scarabæus; and lastly, vegetables, especially the lotus, and, of all things in the world, the onion.*

The most abundant mummies out of this long list are, I believe,

Pettigrew's History of Egyptian Mummies.'

those of the ibis. When the late lamented engineer, Mr. Brunel, returned from Egypt, he was kind enough to present me with a fine specimen of a mummy ibis. It was a shapeless, dirty, brown-looking mass, and portions of it crumbled under the fingers. I was nevertheless determined to look

inside; so, with dissecting scalpel, scissors, and fine

I

toothed saw, began to dissect it

out. The mummy had evidently been submitted to the action of a slow but powerful heat after

it had been prepared, for, on removing the outer semi-burned bandages, the bird itself was found to be in

IBIS MUMMY EXAMINED BY F. T. BUCKLAND, ESQ.

closed in a solid and hard mass of bituminous substance, i. e. the original embalming material remelted by the subsequent fire. How and when the fire took place, who can say

?

A few taps with a chisel caused a large cake of the embalming material to fall off, and underneath it was seen the wing of the bird, the feathers carefully smoothed and properly arranged. For about half-an-hour after their exposure to the air, the shining lustre of these feathers was iridescent, like mother-of-pearl; but this appearance soon vanished. On the under side of the piece broken off were the most beautiful and delicate markings of the structure of the feather-a complete cast, in fact, in bitumen. This substance must have been placed in a very hot and fluid state on the body of the bird, or the impressions would not have been so perfect; they are quite as good as the finest medallion castings in plaster of Paris.

It was for some time difficult to make out anything but the wings, which formed a sort of shroud to the body; but at last, a bit of bone projecting at the end of the mummy gave a hint; the bone was followed up, the wing cut away, and the thigh, leg, foot, and toes, with the scaly skin still on them, exposed (see the figure). Alongside the leg was placed the head, in an exceedingly perfect condition. The bill, six inches long, extended down to the end of the mummy, where it was broken off; the eyes were seen, dry and hard like those of a chicken that was hung a long time in a poulterer's shop; the nostrils were distinctly visible, likewise the large aperture of the ear, telling us that our friend in life could both see, hear, and smell well, and kept good watch and guard when stalking along the muddy banks of the Nile, possibly watching the workmen of Cheops building the great pyramid, or possibly old Herodotus himself climbing up it, note-book in hand; or, could we but know what those eyes have seen, what those ears have heard, we could indeed write a good paper for the Antiquarian or Ethno

logical Societies. If, however, we are ignorant of what ibis saw and heard, we have some clue to what he had for dinner. It has been stated that the scales of a serpent have been found in a mummy ibis. I was not so lucky as to find these, but when chiselling out the neck of the bird, a portion of bitumen gave way, and the contents of the body fell out. Amongst this black mass of shapeless dust, the finger detected something hard; in a few minutes I had picked out some eight or ten little gravel and quartz stones, about the size of turnip seeds or small split peas. How did these stones get there? Not many years ago, an ancient Briton was dug up on the downs, not far from Didcot station, on the Great Western Railway, and in the place where his stomach had once been, was discovered a hard mass of raspberry seed. There was such a matted lump of them, that a medico-antiquarian bystander gave it as his belief that the ancient Briton died of indigestion from eating too many raspberries. In our ibis we found no seeds, but stones; most birds, and among them the ibis, swallow stones to help the horny coats of their gizzards to grind up their food.

Now, when the embalmer prepared our specimen, he did not take out the gizzard: there it remained till it crumbled into dust; and when the bird was again opened, some three or four thousand years afterwards, at Regent's Park Barracks, out fell the stones. The stones tell us that they had been rolled about by water before the bird swallowed them, and that they had been performing the office of "miller's assistants" for some time, for their edges are further worn down and partially polished by the action of the gizzard. I only wish this ibis had dined shortly before death, and then we might have found some traces of his dinner. He was probably an invalid bird, and had fed only upon "slops," which left no trace behind them.

* Some of these secds were planted, and grew into fine specimens of the wild raspberry.