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A STRANGE DISCOVERY IN LIEU OF A PREFACE.
Many years ago I was enjoying in the harbor of New York the charming hospitalities of the officers belonging to one of the finest vessels in the British Navy. The company was gay, cultivated and brilliant. Student and recluse as I then was, I was perhaps more delighted than any one present with the conversation of those practical and polished men of the world.
After supper I was attracted to a small group of earnest talkers, of whom the surgeon of the ship seemed to be the centre and oracle. He was speaking of exhumations a long time after death, of mummies and petrifactions and other curious transformations of the human body. He stated that he had examined some of the skeletons which had been dug out of the ruins of Herculaneum. The bones were almost perfect after the lapse of eighteen hundred years. The complete exclusion of air and water seemed to be the only thing necessary to an indefinite preservation.
The chaplain of the vessel endeavored to give the conversation an aesthetic and semi-religious turn by analyzing the feelings of mingled awe, melancholy and curiosity with which most men survey the remains of a human form--feelings always heightened by the antiquity of the relic, and by the dignity of the person who lived and loved and labored in it.
"The fundamental idea," said he, "is a profound respect for the human body itself as the casket which has contained the spiritual jewel, the soul."
"Yes," remarked the surgeon; "nothing but the lapse of a people into cannibalism can obliterate that sentiment. When the Egyptian embalmers were ready for their work, a certain person came forward and made the necessary incisions for taking out the entrails. He immediately fled away, pursued by volleys of stones and curses from all the others. Hence also the dissections of the dead by medical students are conducted with the utmost secrecy and caution."
"Schiller," said I, "makes one of his heroes remark that the first time he plunged his sword into a living man, he felt a shudder creep over him as if he had desecrated the temple of God."
"Besides the feeling of reverence," continued the clergyman, "we have the awe which death naturally inspires, the melancholy excited by the vain and transitory nature of earthly things; and lastly, a tender and curious interest for the brother-soul which has tasted the sweetness of life and the bitterness of death, and passed onward to those hidden but grander experiences which await us all."
"Those shocking Egyptian mummies," said one of the officers, "are so disgusting that a strange horror is mingled with the gentler emotions you describe."
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