Mr. Champollion had ascertained, in the third place, the analogy of one of the manuscripts, purchased of Casati, to the enchorial inscription of Rosetta, and he had obtained from it, without difficulty, the mode of writing the name Cleopatra in that character. He did not, however, then mention to me the important consequences which he had derived from this discovery; these, it seems, were the subject of a short paper read to the Academy the succeeding Friday; and it will be proper to extract a more particular account of them, from his Letter to Mr. Dacier, since printed; in which I did certainly expect to find the chronology of my own researches a little mere distinctly stated. “The hieroglyphical text of the inscription of Rosetta,” he observes, (p. 6), “exhibited, on account of its fractures, _only the name of Ptolemy_. The obelisc found in the Isle of Philae, and lately removed to London, contains also the hieroglyphical name of _one of the Ptolemies_, expressed by the same characters that occur in the inscription of Rosetta, surrounded by a ring or border, and it is followed by a second border, which must necessarily contain the proper name of a woman, and of a queen of the family of the Lagidae, since this group is terminated by the hieroglyphics expressive of the _feminine_ gender; characters which are found at the end of the names of all the Egyptian goddesses without exception. The obelisc was fixed, it is said, to a basis bearing a Greek inscription, which is a petition of the priests of Isis at Philae, addressed to King Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his sister, and to Cleopatra his wife. Now, if this obelisc, and the hieroglyphical inscription engraved on it, were the result of this petition, which in fact adverts to the consecration of a monument of the kind, the border, with the feminine proper name, can only be that of one of the Cleopatras. This name, and that of Ptolemy, which in the Greek have several letters in common, were capable of being employed for a comparison of the hieroglyphical characters composing them; and if the similar characters in these names expressed in both the same sounds, it followed that their nature must be entirely phonetic.” This course of investigation appears, indeed, to be so simple and so natural, that the reader must naturally be inclined to forget that any preliminary steps were required: and to take it for granted, either that it had long been known and admitted, that the rings on the pillar of Rosetta contained the name of Ptolemy, and that the semicircle and the oval constituted the female termination, or that Mr. Champollion himself had been the author of these discoveries.