Note 87 — Chapter XI

In examining the head of a mummy opened by M. Belzoni at the Egyptian Museum in Piccadilly, I mentioned to him the way in which I had extracted the brains of the patriarch; which led to an examination of the skull of the mummy before us, to see if it were possible to find out by what means the Egyptians extracted the brains previous to embalming. No division of the scalp or inequality of the bone, as if it had been forcibly opened, could be discovered on any part of the head. There was no passage even for a probe up through the palate or the substance of the sphenoidal bone; but the right nostril was larger than the left, and, on introducing a crooked probe, I could carry it up into the cavity of the skull, and I suspect that to have been the opening by which the brain was extracted.