ASLEEP FOR CENTURIES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 581, 31 March 1870, Page 2

ASLEEP FOR CENTURIES.

(From the Daily Telegraph}. " My blessing," Sancfco Panza cried, "on the man who first invented sleep ! it covers one up like a cloak." What benedictions would not the grateful squire have invoked upon Dr Grusselbach, Professor at the University of Upsal, in Sweden, who, by his own account has amended the invention, and put it in the power of anybody to slumber as long and soundly as may be wished. Nature's restorer at present is a fleeting luxury, varying in duration from the " forty winks " hastily and uneasily snatched, to the refreshing "snooze," the good "nap," the ''long, sound sleep" of healthy fatigue, and the protracted slumber of over weariness, or narcotics. But whether it be the brief indulgence after dinner, the nightly rest, or the troubled trance produced by drugs, we wake up from these intervals of quiet after a few hours at the most, and then we must face the toils and cares of existence till nightcaps and pillows come round again. Professor Gmsselbach offers to humanity the boon cf a sleep, limited by nothing but the caprice of the sleeper. Do affairs go badly with you ? Are you disgusted with the nineteenth century, and with yourself ? Would it be convenient for you to " turn in " for a few lustra, or a few centuries ? Have you, like Bottom, a great " exposition of slumber come upou you ?" Repair, then, to the professor, who will put you to bed, and tuck -you up snugly and safely in a state of unconsciousness which can be prolonged to any date you like to mention. Prosperity will knock at your door and bring your shaving water, either in twenty years, in so many decades, or centuries, as your case may render desirable. The learned doctor having taken your instructions in regard to this same re-awaken-ing, will administer a little dose, the composition of which is his own secret ; and " not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the East " can equal the effects of that amazing physic. You will gradually turn benumed and brittle, so that, if it were dropped, the body would fly to pieces like a China figure ; yet you will not be dead, but merely dormant — suspended between death and life— unconscious, calm, and free from your gout, your mother-in-law, your bills falling due, or whatever else made the spirit sad and weary. You need no longer envy the happy dormouse or sagacious bear, which snore away the miseries of a northern winter. Drink of the Professor's draught, having first carefully provided that he does not crack or fracture your slumbering limbs, and having also named the day on which you will return and see " how the world wags;" and upon which day, if all goes well, andDr Grusselbach be as good as his word, he will sprinkle over, you "a stimulating fluid," at the contact of which you will relax, you will stretch, yawn, rub your eyes, and recover active animation — older in point of time by the period of your slumber, but not aged in physical condition beyond the moment when you took the sleeping potion. Younger, on the contrary, will you arise by all the glorious, strength and restoration of that dreamless and steady bout of sleep. What could be more fascinating in promise than the Professor's offer — although there is, without, doubt, an element of uneasiness in the chance of being broken into little pieces, or mislaid, or overlooked when the day came round— a risk even of surviving the excellent Professor, or worst of all, of having that " stimulating fluid " poured in vain upon the too confiding form, which in such a case must slumber on to the crack of doom ? '"'" r '■";'" /■• But the world will burn to know how Professor Grusselbach came by bis discovery. It must be understood, then, that among the mummies exhumed in Egypt, the learned have long marvelled to find some of these ancient ladies and gentlemen complete in all the interior organs of life, albeit dry and yellow ; while others were what cooks call " drawn," that is to say, devoid of all " insides." The proportion of the first class was

small, but yet well marked ; and the problem has long been " what could it mean ?" The poorer Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, used to be salted down without much previous embalming ; but mummies of the kind in. question are found in very expensire cases j so that these peculiar examples could not be \ pickled proletarians of the Nile— merely sardines of the State, not worth disembowelling. There was another meaning in these things, and our doctor says he has found it out. He i has come to the conclusion, that among the secrets known to the " wisdom of the Egyptians" was one which taught them how-to suspend animation in the living body, and to restore it after a lapse of years ; wherefore he regards the perfectly preserved mummies as those of individuals who submitted to the process, and were afterwards, either by I wilful neglect, inadvertence, or the loss of the necessary knowledge, left in their unbroken trance. Whenever we find the usual specimen, neatly done up in bitumen and linen, with its intestines laid in the four little chests, bearing the colours of Amset Hapi, Tuatmat, and Kabhsnuf, and a scaraboeus deposited in its stomach, there can, of course, be no doubt. The antique personage under examination died and was duly embalmed, after the example of Osiris, and he has been for three thousand odd years awaiting the return of his spirit to the flesh. But wherever a complete Egyptian is discovered, we must picture to ourselves a very different transaction . Here was some learned priest, or deep-read sage— some powerful prince or wealthy merchant — who was aware I of the profound secret, or who was able to profit by it. Either he had been crossed in I loye for some dark-eyed daughter of the i Nile ; or had lost a contract for a pyramid, and was consequently melancholy ; had fallen out of favour with Pharoah ; had made a prodigious astronomical calculation, and wanted to live to see the verification of it ; had lost his eldest born son through the tenth plague of Egypt, and his paternal sorrow sought the calm of the grave without its irrevocable conditions ; had been an enthusiast in chemical science; yet sick of a troublesome disease ; or was merely a sleep-loving fellow, with a curiosity to know what the world would be like a thousand years after Rameses 111. Such a one would come to the Grusselbachs of the period, and. having entered his name in the " book of the priests of Horus, God of Slumber," with the date of his desired return to this life, he would pay his fee in currency of Thebes or On, and drink his dose ; after which they would lay him by duly labelled and scheduled, something after the fashion, only in a subtler and sublimer way, of provincial bakers, who chalk upon the pavement, for the direction of the policemen, " Call at 4." But all this, ifc will be objected, is mere theory. Well, the Professor has been at the subject for fifteen years, and he declares that he has much more than theory for the support of his view. Among other experimental animals, it is said that he possesses a snake which he has successively benumbed and restored to life by those potions to which we have referred— keeping it sometimes one year and sometimes several years in the condition of suspended animation, but never as yet failing to revivify it by his stimulating fluid. So confidents the Swedish Professor of his method that he has petitioned the Stockholm Government to make over to him the next murderer condemned to death. If the authorities permit, he engages to treat this experimental malefactor in the same manner as the snake, and to restore him to existence at the end of two years, when it is proposed that the man's life shall be spared. Without being too particular about the last part of the arrangement, several European countries would, doubtless, comply with the Professor's request ; but surely there is a " shorter way" whereby to test this interesting question. If those intact Egyptian mummies be what the Professor describes, they are only asleep all this while, and want nothing but a touch of the " stimulating fluid." Why not begin, then, with one of them, so as to let civilization behold an ancient individual of the reign of Thothmes or Mycerinus sitting upright in his sarcophagus, and calling aloud in demotic Egyptian for a draught of Nile water and a look at the calendar ? What questions we should ask him as soon as we got somebody like Sir Gardiner Wilkinson or Champolion, who could play interpreter for us I Failing such, we should have to fetch the Rosetta stone, and invite him by signs to be kind enough to point out anything thereon in the way of hieroglyphics which he recollected, and thus to give us the truth about Cheops 's Pyramid and the Shepherd Kings. Above all, wo would wish to know how it felt to slumber for four thousand years, if Sesostris or Cambyses at all disturbed his dreams, and whether Professor Grusselbach had really got hold of the right ingredients to furnish us all with the chance of the same delightful power of chronic sleep. Perhaps the Swedish chemist will answer that these unlucky mummies have been slumbering too long, and that there is a limit to the repose which he, in imitation of the antique chemists, can provide. In that case the numerom applicants, who would otherwise be very glad to sleep a twelvemonth or so ''off the reel"— impatient heirs, timid Tory squires, banished lovers, directors of insurance companies, and such like— will naturally pause before they pay the learned doctor his fee, and quaff this new and attractive cup of modified Lethe. Besides, he keeps his secret at present to himself 5 and if anything should happen to the Professor, his clients would therefore run the risk of being like the people in the tale of "Sleeping Beauty," or like those poor mummies, with nobody to wake. them up, being all the time as fragile as glass — at the mercy of a careless housemaid or a reckless railway porter. We have never been advocates of murder; but, whiJe the whole subject stands in need of experiment, it will be more than a little provoking if Sweden bas got no criminal on hand wherewith to oblige Dr Grusselbach.