Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/153

Rh but thick-lipped, and full of some kind of black paste. This paste, being partly cut away with the scissors, disclosed some much worn and very brittle teeth, which, moreover, are white and well preserved. The mustache and beard arc thin. They seem to have been kept shaved during life, but were probably allowed to grow during the king's last illness; or they may have grown after death. The hairs are white, like those of the head and eyebrows, but are harsh and bristly, and from two to three millimetres in length. The skin is of earthy brown splotched with black. Finally, it may be said that the face of the mummy gives a fair idea of the face of the living king. The expression is unintellectual, perhaps slightly animal; but, even under the somewhat grotesque disguise of mummification, there is plainly to be seen an air of sovereign majesty, of resolve, and of pride. The rest of the body is as well preserved as the head; but in consequence of the reduction of the tissues its aspect is less life-like.... The corpse is that of an old man, but of a vigorous and robust old man. We know, indeed, that Rameses II reigned for sixty-seven years, and that he must have been nearly one hundred years old when he died." Another mummy, which had been laid in the sarcophagus of Queen Nofretari, queen of Ahmes I of the eighteenth dynasty, proved, when unbandaged, to be the mummy of Rameses III, another great king, of the twentieth dynasty. It was less well preserved than the mummy of Rameses II. The physiognomy is more delicate and more intelligent; but the height of the body is less, the shoulders are less wide, and the strength of the man was inferior. The two mummies, replaced in the glass cases, will be exhibited with their faces uncovered in the museum at Boulak.

Maternal Families.—Sir George Campbell, president, began his address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association with some observations on the races of India. He spoke particularly of the Khassyahs, a very peculiar people of the hill regions, with highly developed constitutional and elective forms of government, who were also specially interesting as exhibiting an excellent specimen of the matriarchal or matriherital system fully carried out under recognized and well-defined law among a civilized people. The result of his observation of them had been to separate in his mind the two systems of matriheritage and polyandry, and to suggest that polyandry was really only a local accident, the result of scarcity of women. Among the Khassyahs there was no poly-andry, so far as he had been able to learn, though there was great facility for divorce; and heritage through the female became quite intelligible when he saw that the women did not leave the maternal home and family and join any other family, as do the Aryans. They are the stock-in-trade of the family, the queen-bees, as it were; they take to themselves husbands—only one at a time—and, if he is divorced, they may take another; but the husband is a mere outsider belonging to another family. The property of the woman goes in the woman's family, the property of the man in bis own maternal family. It should be added, however, that in these maternal families, though the heritage comes through the female, the males rule. The extension of our accurate information respecting the diverse peoples of India might throw a flood of light on the social history of the human race. The speaker then proceeded to what he announced as the main object of his address—to recommend the systematic and scientific cultivation of man, which he might call homi-culture, with a view both to physical and mental qualities. It seems very sad, indeed, he said, that when so much has been done to improve and develop dogs, cattle, oysters, and cabbages, nothing whatever has been done for man, and he is left very much where he was when we have the first authentic records of him. Knowledge, education, arts, he has no doubt acquired; but there seems to be no reason to suppose that the individual man is physically or mentally a superior creature to what he was five thousand years ago. "We are not sure that under very modern influences he may not retrograde. In regard to animals and plants we have very largely mastered the principles of heredity and culture, and the modes by which good qualities may be maximized and bad ones minimized. Why should not man