UTILISING RELICS.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 2586, 21 April 1877, Page 4

UTILISING RELICS.

However right every properly-minded person must hold it to be to venerate the relics of his own faith, *>.nd to show despite to those of that of his opponents, the idea of the utilisation of relics seems to us to be new. It comes to us from Egypt —but certainly is not of native Egyptian growth. It seems that the lest Nile flood has been remarkably, abundant, and that the cotton grown under the blessing of its ample irrigation is so promisiDg as to cause great satisfaction to the exporters. To some extent, however, the staple of the Egyptian cotton is fouud, or" fancied, to be defected in that proper tenacity of fibre which is attributed to the presence of phosphorus in the elements of the soil. The fellaheen of Egypt have the bnd habit of using ' manure in a manner unfamiliar to the farmers of Eugland.. Finding it to be a cheap fuel, admirably adapted for the use of the bakehouse, they thus employ it, to the deterioration, it is urged, of the soil to which it ought naturally to return. In this state of things it is suggested by some great inventor —it surely must have been by an American —to utilise the mummied remains of the sacrrd birds and beasts which were honourably entombed in past time in hope of a better resurrection—in point of fact, to turn them into manure for the cotton crop. This, probably, is only a feeler. For the mummies of sacred cat, ibis, ox, or what not, numerous though they may be, can only bear a small proportion to the bulk of the mummies of the ancient Egyptians themselves. If the remains of the gods, or the symbols of the gods, are to be thus made useful, why not those of their contemporary worshippers ? We have done very much to show our proper contempt for that blindness.of the old Egyptians which led them to honour their dead. Distinguished travellers have sailed from our shores who for months together, have eaten no food that had not been cooked at fires fed upon mummy cases. Tourists have been smothered, as they loudly complained, with once-human dust. The idea of turning all this cumbersome evidence of. the vast antiquity of an ancient race and faith into material for the mills of Manchester has in it something that may be called heroic. It reflects a ray of the very hardest political" economy back into the past for thousands of years. It presents a humiliating contrast between the white light of the present age and the tined darkness of the time of the dynasties of Manetho. Bright - minded persons among us have often sighed at the vast waste of productive labor witnessed by such useless masses as the Pyramids, the Sphynx, the Temples of Luxor and of Larnac. Had all the time .devoted to hewing stone and cutting hieroglyphics been usefully employed in growing grain and spinning cotton, how much happier and better off the old Fgyptains would have been !—how much better should we now also be '—free ; from any of those troublesome questions of decipherment or research which now occupy the minds of men who might have been worthy of better things—might have made good salesmen or book-keepers. There is a kind, if not of poetical yet of quasi-economical justice in strewing the bones of these old ignoramuses, who worked not for solid emolument but' for invisible gods or for hopes of immortality, over the fields that they once tilled, and thus supplying a cheap abundance of phosphates for the masters of their &©« scendants.—Pall Mall Gazette.