perishable articles than sun-dried mummies are detained in the goods station of a London rail way while the consignees are looking for a lost invoice. Or1 finding it contained what experts might pronounce to be a mummy, but what by the mere policeman was sure to be regarded as a corpse, the authorities communicated with the coroner, and this egregious official, not being an expert in mummies, took a strictly professional view of the matter. He summoned a jury and held an inquest. The jury evidently entered into the humour of the situation, and returned the following verdict, which shows how thor oughly and conscientiously they discharged their duty : — " That the woman was found dead at the railway goods-station, Sun street, on April 15, and did die on some date unknown in some foreign country, probably South America, from some cause unknown. No proofs of a violent death are found, and the body has been dried and buried in some foreign manner, probably sun-dried and cave-buried, and the jurors are satisfied that this body does not show any recent crime in this country, and that the deceased was unknown and about twenty-five years of age.-' It seems to us that the jurors were very sensible men. They stated the facts before them with lucidity, precision, and caution, withal, and with no little subdued humour. Theirs not to reason why they were summoned to sit on a mummy. That rested with the police and with the coroner. Avoiding the legal pitfalls of mummy or corpse, they showed, nevertheless, that there was no rational ground for an inquest, and thereby passed a covert vote of censure on the coroner for making fools of himself and them. It is this gentleman's procedure that seems to be most open to criticism. A London coroner should have something better to do than to hold inquests on mummies and more sense than to do it. He has not even the excuse of the coroner in a re mote district of the United States whose story is told by some American humorist. This ingen ious person, finding business slack in his district, hit upon the expedimentof digging corpses up in the churchyard and throwing them into the ad jacent river. When they were fished out he summoned a jury and held an inquest. The precedent is tempting to a man of humour, but it is scarcely applicable to London coroners and Peruvian mummies.
However the poor mummy got its quietus at last. After the farce of the lost invoice and the grotes que inquest, the railway tompany duly delivered it at the Maison tie Melle. But by this time it was scarcely distinguishable from a corpse, and the Belgian authorities promptly ordered it to be buried as such in the public cemetery. "It is supposed," wrote the reverend father who told the last sad story of its fate to Mrs. Aitken, "that the moist air of the sea and of the climate of England has caused the beginning of a decomposition in the fleshy parts. Whatever may be the truth, the fact is that the poor mummy rests now in the cemetery at Melle " — and to do him justice the reverend gentleman, though full of gratitude to Mrs. Aitken for "all her kindness and trouble," .does not seem to have thought that his museum was exactly the right place for it. We should say that the cemetery was a much better place, and we might almost add that the cemetery in Peru, from which the mummy was originally extracted was the best place of all. Peruvian mummies are cheap, it appears, but then they are rather apt to be nasty. Their archa;ological interest is hardly sufficient to justify their deportation to a climate and atmosphere in which they cannot be trusted not to turn back into corpses. Let us hope that henceforth they will be left for the most part to the kindlier keeping of the sun which has dried them and the caves which have held them in Peru. But railway companies which lose the invoice of a mummy and then connive at the absurdity of a coroner's inquest, which might have the effect of getting rid of the corpus delicti, must expect to pay for their negli gence. So the jury seems to have thought when it awarded Mrs. Aitken compensation to the amount of ^75. In spite of the forensic dispute between Mr. Justice Darling and Mrs. Aitkeh's counsel as to whether a mummy is always a mummy, and a corpse always a corpse, the find ing of the jury seems to us to be full of common sense. If the railway company had not managed to lose the invoice, nothing would have been heard of the distinction. Nor will it enhance the reputation of the London and North-Western Railway with the public to find that the attempt to charge as a corpse for a consignment accepted as a mummy had to be abandoned and found no defence in court. — The Times (London).
