ordinary genius, but the true direction of it was long unrecognized by those very countrymen of his who ridiculously put him forward as a rival of Champollion. "It fell to his lot," as Professor Tyndall has said, "to discover facts in Optics which Newton's theory was incompetent to explain; and he finally succeeded in placing on an immovable basis the Undulatory Theory of Light." Helmholtz, a kindred genius, thus speaks of him: "His was one of the most profound minds that the world has ever seen." But it is not true that he discovered the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphics, or even that his labours assisted Champollion in the discovery. When the key was once discovered and recognized as the true one, it was found that one or two of Young's results were correct. But there was nothing in his method or theory by which he or any one else could distinguish between his right and his wrong results, or which could lead him or any one else a single step in advance. Young was certainly right in assuming that the first two signs in the hieroglyphic name of Ptolemy1 were P and T, but his next step was a failure, and so was the next after that. He did not succeed in analyzing this royal name or that of Berenike. All his other attempts were simple failures. "He mistook Autokrator for Arsinoe, and Cæsar for

1 That the oval rings contained royal names was first pointed out by the Danish scholar Zoega, who was also the first in modern times to assert that some hieroglyphic characters were phonetic.

Euergetes." "His translations," says Dr. Birch, “are below criticism, being as unfounded as those of Kircher." Besides being unable to identify more than a very few alphabetic characters, he failed to recognize the nature of determinatives, no less an essential part of the key than the phonetic.

Champollion.

Champollion's discovery was of a very different nature. Besides the two kinds of Egyptian characters which are used on the Rosetta stone, there is a third, commonly called the hieratic. The hieroglyphic characters, with their accurately elaborate designs of animals, plants and other objects, are very suitable for monumental inscriptions, but very unsuitable for the ordinary purposes of life; and the Egyptians had from the earliest times used a tachygraphic or cursive character which is a rough and abridged form of the hieroglyphic. The stones of the great Pyramid bear notes upon them in this character which were already written in the quarry. At a much more recent period (some seven centuries before Christ), the character was still further abridged and debased, and assumed the form now called demotic, and this is the second character on the Rosetta stone. A great many documents in our museums are written in this character. Long before he suspected the real nature of Egyptian writing, Champollion had patiently studied the relations be

tween its three different kinds, and had discovered the essential identity of the three, demotic being a debasement of the hieratic, the hieratic a debasement of the hieroglyphic. Through M. Dacier he had presented two dissertations to the French Académie des Sciences, one on the hieratic and a second on the demotic character. His enemy Klaproth asserts that he suppressed the dissertation on the hieratic character for fear of its telling tales against him, and showing his need of Young's guidance. I do not know that it is true that Champollion tried to suppress this "Mémoire;" but if he did, it surely was not for the purpose malignantly asserted by Klaproth and ignorantly repeated in this country. The dissertation in question is a very excellent work, chiefly consisting in plates, wherein passages of the Book of the Dead written in hieroglyphics are placed side by side with the same passages copied from hieratic manuscripts, and the identity is made apparent to the most unlearned eye. And if, as Klaproth asserts, Champollion had wished to destroy all trace of certain passages which occur in his text, he would certainly not have repeated them, as he does, in his letter to M. Dacier. But the most important step in his progress was discovering the identity of certain demotic characters, the alphabetic nature of which had been demonstrated by Akerblad, with the corresponding hieratic ones, and consequently with their hieroglyphic originals. If any one has a right to be named in con

junction with Champollion, it is not Young, but Akerblad, to whom he does full justice (as he does indeed to Young himself) at the very beginning of his letter to M. Dacier. But in 1822,1 Champollion had not only one bilingual inscription before him, but two, the obelisk of Phile having been found, with an Egyptian inscription and also a Greek one containing the name of Cleopatra, which offered special facility for decipherment, two of the letters in it being alike, and others being the same as in the name of Ptolemy. But in discussing this question, it must not be forgotten that the key to hieroglyphic decipherment does not consist in recognizing the phonetic nature of this or that sign, but in the knowledge of the simultaneous use of both phonetic and ideographic signs, not only

1 That Champollion never thought of hieroglyphic characters as phonetic till after Young's publication, is one of Klaproth's unscrupulous assertions which has been thoughtlessly repeated by some who should have known better. It has been refuted by M. Champollion-Figeac, who in the Revue Archéologique of 1856, 1857 and 1858, has produced abundance of evidence from his brother's writings between the years 1808 and 1814. In his Mémoire sur les Ecritures Egyptiennes, read on Aug. 7, 1810, before the Society of Sciences and Arts of Grenoble, Champollion strongly insists upon the necessity of phonetism, for otherwise how could foreign names, for which no symbolism existed, be expressed in writing? "L'inscription de Rosette présente les noms Grecs de Ptolémée, Bérénice, Arsinoe, Pyrrha, d'Aréia, de Diogènes, d'Aétes, d'Alexandre, etc.; ils ne pouvaient être exprimés dans la partie hiéroglyphique de ce monument, si ces hiéroglyphes n'avaient, comme nous l'avons dit, la faculté de produire des sons.'

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in every line, but in nearly every word, and of the law of this use. And neither Akerblad, nor, since the language had ceased to be spoken, had any one else before Champollion a notion of this.

The truth of Champollion's alphabet was demonstrated by its enabling one to read the name not only of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, but of all the Persian, Greek and Roman sovereigns of the country. And, what was far more important still, the meanings of many hieroglyphic groups, on being read according to his system, were immediately known from the Coptic vocabulary. Champollion's hypothesis that the old Egyptian language was identical with Coptic, though a very imperfect one, and productive even at the present day of many errors among those who discard it, was not fatally wrong, for Coptic is in fact a later stage of the language in which the hieroglyphic texts are written, and the vocabulary of the latter is full of words which are as intelligible to the Coptic scholar as the infinitives of Latin verbs are to a mere Italian scholar. The remaining years of his short life were spent in copying, studying and interpreting Egyptian texts. The amount of work accomplished by him in eight years is almost incredible. He not only laid the foundations of a Grammar and Dictionary, but illustrated the history and religion of ancient Egypt by the translations and analyses of short but authentic texts, opening an entirely new world to the historical student, and con

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