Whether this lady ever walked on the streets of Thebes or Memphis-whether she ever held a situation in Pharoah's household,-or was among the maidens that accompanied his daughter to the banks of the Nile, at the time she found Moses among the flags, we are not informed; but one thing is certain, that this precious, relic, bears evident marks of high antiquity, and, as such, must be regarded, as an evidence of the wonderfully enduring effects of that curious process, by which the ancient Egyptians preserved their dead for such a length of time.

Not half so enduring, however, this Egyptian process, as that more simple one adopted by nature, in the preservation of those still more wonderful relics that we find here, in our immediate neighbourhood,—these Fossil remains of the Airthy Whale; and that still more splendid memorial of times that are passed away, the Fossil Elk of the Isle of Man, which we see standing in the farther end of the room; and whose stately form, looking at this distance almost as fresh as when newly stript of its flesh, yonder geologist is so busy in contemplating: the former a monument of some striking revolution that has taken place in the estuary of the Forth;-the latter, of generations, or of a species of animals, that, to all appearance, have passed away.

In the instance of the Egyptian lady, we find, that notwithstanding all the care and attention that had been originally taken, and all the expense bestowed, in order to preserve her, it has been found necessary to take an additional precaution, in order to exclude the external air, which had already begun to make inroads on her form; but in order to protect these interesting

relics, preserved by nature's more wonderful process, no such precaution has been found necessary-the bones have actually become more hardened, and, consequently, more imperishable than when in their original form! In casting our eyes forward into that apartment, more particularly set apart for the accommodation of the huge and gigantic specimens of Creative Wisdom, how quickly are they arrested by the two stately Camelopards, or the male and female Giraffe, which are now seen rearing their towering heads above their bulky and unwieldy fellows. Beside these lofty and towering animals, the Elephant, the largest quadruped in creation, which is seen standing on one side, with the Walrus and Rhinoceros, and other animals of the bulky kind, seem to sink in the scale of magnitude, and to belong to a more diminutive class.

But what a wondrous, a motley, an incongruous assembly-do we here find mixed together, as we advance and take our stand among them. Here, are collected under one roof, I was going to say; nay, under the roof of a single apartment, the Polar Bear and Walrus of the north-the striped Zebra, andwonderfully formed Kanguroo of the south-the Elephant, the Rhinoceros, and a beautiful skeleton of the Camel of the east, the Musk Ox, from the northern parts of the western world; while, the Lion of the Desert, roams at large, and the four-horned Sheep, stands unmolested. -Here also are to be seen, harmonizing together, the Tapir of India, with its long-pointed snout, and that remarkable animal the Gnu, which embodies in its structure, a head peculiar to itself, but adorned with the horns of the buffalo, the body and tail of a horse,

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and the legs and feet of an antelope! while the skele ton-head of the Hippopotamus is made to unfold before us its enormous jaws ;-and the Dugong, that singula inhabitant of the watery element, which perhaps h been the means of giving rise to many of those strange tales we hear about the mermaid, has its place assigned in its immediate neighbourhood.

- Here, are also to be found, a most beautiful specime of the globular Madrepore, from the eastern seashighly interesting Babylonian relic, being in a mos excellent state of preservation; and scattered about i this vast apartment, in any of the lurking holes int which they can find access, are a number of those un couth looking figures those hideously formed, a rather deformed, Idols, which I have already so largely dwelt upon; and whose presence here, might have bee well dispensed with, had it not, perhaps, been, to de monstrate by the contrast, when placed beside thes wonderful contrivances of infinite wisdom, how far the mind of man may be debased and led aside by the in fluence of superstition, when he allows himself to be en slaved by such delusions;—and reads not, as he ought to do, for himself, the sublime pages written for his instruction by the God of Nature ;-nor regardeth aright the work of his hands.

In the upper part of this apartment, there is now set out, and displayed on a table, what may be considered an excellent treat to the Geologist, a choice and well-arranged assortment of specimens of Mountai® Rocks; from the most hard and durable species of granite, down to grains of the finest sand,-from the most compact Basalt and indurated Whinstone, to the!

porous Pumice that floats upon the tide, and the still lighter Volcanic Ashes, that float in the air-such, it may be, as played the part of the destroying Angel, at the last grand exhibition that was represented on the boards of the theatre of that ill-fated city, which among the wonders of the present era, is now seen, at the distance of little more than 10 miles from Naples, amid hills planted with vineyards, emerging from the grave of its former oblivion, and throwing off, with the aid of man, that shroud of ashes, with which it has been covered for more than seventeen centuries!

Yes: have any of my readers been reading in some of the journals of the day, of the excavations now going on among the subterranean ruins of Pompeii-of the streets laid open to the light of day, after being buried for nearly eighteen hundred years-of the little booths and shops, of antiquated shape, that lined their sides, and the tesselated pavement of compact lava, which shewed that it was not the first of volcanic eruptions that occasioned this awful catastrophe of those rich and adorned mansions, whose empty apartments, and silent halls, and solitary stair-cases, have still left enough behind, to shew that they constituted the abodes. of the great-of those cellars, that seem to have entombed the groups of the inhabitants, who had sought for safety by taking shelter in them,-and of those numerous skeletons, that, by the attitudes in which they were found in the streets, seemed also to have been sensible of, and were flying from the danger that threatened them; though, from the same data, it would appear, that their fate was at last both sudden and complete : for some of the poor wretches seem to have been arrest

ed in their flight, in the very act of carrying off articles they wished to save:-of those temples, whose oracles have been so long silenced-of those palaces, that have been so long ingulphed in darkness;—and of that proud theatre to which I have alluded as above, and the mighty ruins of which (in demonstrating to the world, that it was capable of containing 30,000 spectators,) evidences, at the same time, the former populosity of this utterly desolated, and, till lately, deserted place.

Have some of my readers, (I say) been recently made acquainted with these things, and wish to see some specimens of those destructive substances, which, by being emitted from the craters of Nature's tremendous fire-engines, called Volcanoes, have in instances like this, been productive of such terrific results; here, (if any where) they may expect to see them, in all their variety of Lava and Scoria-from the stiff and paste-like. Pouzzolana, which in its progress swallowed up Herculaneum, to the more light and airy floating ashes, which, in their descent, buried the town of Pompeii.

THE STAIR-CASE.

In ascending the stair that leads to the central apartmert, we are gratified with a sight of a small specimen -(being only about nine feet in length,) of that huge animal among the reptile creation, the Boa Constrictor,an animal of the most formidable kind with regard to size, being the largest of all the serpent tribe, and of such amazing strength, that one of them has been ob-served to break the bones of a buffalo, which he had seized and got infolded in his enormous twistings, and make them to crack like the report of a gun,—how wisely than has it been ordered, in the constitution of