Butchell, who has most certainly not been preserved for her beauty. We are apt to think that in this age we have arrived at the very perfection of advertising, direct and indirect; yet here is a specimen of the ability of the last century, 
Peruvian mummy.which will bear comparison with our best efforts. Think of a charlatan utilising his defunct partner in this direction! Van Butchell, who would seem to have been a kind of St. John Long of his day, appears to have had his wife embalmed—on the same principle that Barnum stuffed his mermaid—to draw the public purse; and like that worthy he advertised his wares judiciously in the public press. On the breast of the lady, for instance, we find a card inscribed with the following notice from the “St. James’s Chronicle” of October 21st, 1773:—
“Van Butchell (not willing to be unfortunately circumstanced, and wishing to convince some good minds they have been misinformed) acquaints the curious no stranger can see his embalmed wife unless (by a friend personally) introduced to himself any day between nine and one, Sundays excepted.”
What could induce persons to pay a visit to 
Skeleton of gorilla or highest order of ape.Mr. Van Butchell in order to see such a shocking spectacle we cannot conceive. In this collection the body is by no means out of place, flanked on either hand by an Egyptian mummy, and by the preserved remains of a woman who died in the Lock Hospital, whilst a dried specimen of the genus homo, sitting crouched up on his haunches, looks on apparently amazed at the change of scene he experiences from the Guaco at Caxamanca, in Peru. There is food for conjecture in another skeleton of a young lad close at hand. All his history is comprised in the fact that he was found erect in a vault, with the remnants of his clothes on, under St. Botolph’s, Aldgate, old church, in the year 1742. The last time the vault had been opened was during the Great Plague in 1665, so that in all probability the poor little fellow was employed in some way in the interment, and must have been forgotten by the workmen when the vault was finally closed.
