ANIMAL WORSHIP, a practice found to prevail or to have prevailed in the most widely distant parts of the world: in India, where it is a consequence of the belief in the transmigra tion of souls, according to which the soul of a god may pass into the body of an animal; in the heart of Africa, where it is still in life; in South America, where very remarkable instances of it were met with by the earliest Spanish visitors; but its most extraordinary develop ments were in ancient Egypt. Nearly all the more important animals found in the country were regarded as sacred in some part of Egypt. Some animals were held sacred throughout the whole land, but in many cases the animals en joyed a local reverence only; an animal that was worshipped in one nome might be an ob ject of aversion in the next and destroyed at every opportunity. The degree of reverence paid to the sacred animals was such that the voluntary killing of one was punishable with death, and if any one killed an animal involun tarily in a nome in which it was held sacred he was punished by a fine. Throughout Egypt
the killing of a hawk or an ibis, whether volun tary or not, was punished with death. So strong was the feeling of the people on this point that when it was of the utmost impor tance to the Egyptians that they should con ciliate the Romans, even the intercession of the lung was impotent to save from the fury of the people a Roman soldier who had killed a cat. The animals were regarded as sacred to the deities, and the worship paid to them was symbolical. The Egyptian idols always bore on a human body the head of the animal sacred to the god represented by the idol. Only in three cases were certain animals believed to he incarnations of the deities themselves. These were at Memphis, where the bull Apis was worshipped as an incarnation of Phtha ; at Heliopolis, where the bull Mnevis was rever enced as an incarnation of Osiris; and at Men des, where a goat received worship as an in carnation of Khem.