This “unbridled pillage,” as Maspero justly calls it, in which the consuls of the various European powers played an ignoble but doubtless lucrative part, lasted for more than thirty years, in spite of the protests of men like Champollion, who could understand the irreparable loss which was being inflicted on the infant science of Egyptology by this mutilation and confounding of the documents on which its future depended. Among its practitioners were one or two men who were distinguished from the vulgar crowd of papyrus, scarab, and mummy hunters by a certain dim appreciation of the fact that the treasures with which they were dealing had a value greater than that of their price in the curio-market, and who have added at least a few interesting and remarkable items to the mass of Egyptian treasure which the nineteenth century accumulated, though our gratitude to them for this must always be qualified by the fact that we have no certain knowledge of what they lost and destroyed in the process, but can only judge from their own admissions that it must have been far more than they preserved. Of these men who may be pronounced guilty, but with extenuating circumstances, the most interesting, and perhaps the least harmful, was the inimitable Belzoni, to whose unwearying efforts we owe the opening of the Second Pyramid, the discovery of the tomb of Sety I, the most perfect example of the rock-hewn tomb of a Pharaoh of the New Empire, and the magnificent alabaster sarcophagus of Sety which is one of the treasures of the Soane Museum, London, besides several of the most important royal statues in the Egyptian Galleries of the British Museum. No one who wishes to realise what the young science had to endure at the hands of its first devotees can afford to neglect the extraordinary farrago of vanity and pomposity, ignorance and self-seeking, but also of patience and endurance, and a certain inborn instinct for what was either beautiful or valuable, which Belzoni has jumbled together under the sounding title--“Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in EGYPT AND NUBIA.”