What different impressions the same pictorial representation may convey to two different persons, we have many an amusing instance of in the history of our Egyptian discoveries, or efforts at discovery. We borrow an example from the pages before us. On the wall of the temple at Philæ, at the first cataract of the Nile, a figure is seen seated at work on what seems a potter’s wheel, and there is a group of hieroglyphics over its head. One learned translator reads and explains thus:—“Kaum the Creator, on his wheel, moulds the divine members of Osiris (the type of man) in the shining house of life, or the solar disk.” Another learned man, Mr Birch of the British Museum, soars, if possible, still higher for a meaning:—“Phtah Totonem, the father of beginnings, is setting in motion the egg of the sun and moon, director of the gods of the upper world.” Mr Wilson, we presume, in accordance with a still later interpretation, calls this figure simply the “ram-headed god Kneph,” without explaining what he is doing with his wheel. If the picture and the hieroglyphic together lead to such various results, we may easily conceive what wild work would be made by an attempt to interpret a pictorial representation alone. We hesitate to assign to the inscriptions discovered in these ruined cities the true character of hieroglyphics; that is, of a system of symbols by means of which, independently of oral tradition, the ideas of one generation could be conveyed to another. But our readers would probably prefer to have Mr Wilson’s matured judgment to our own conjectures. He says:— “On the sculptured tablets of Copan, Quirigua, and Palenque, as well as on the colossal statues at Copan and other ancient sites in Central America, groups of hieroglyphic devices occur arranged in perpendicular or horizontal rows, as regularly as the letters of any ancient or modern inscription. The analogies to Egyptian hieroglyphics are great, for all the figures embody, more or less clearly defined, representations of objects in nature or art. But the differences are no less essential, and leave no room to doubt that in these columns of sculptured symbols we witness the highest development to which picture-writing attained, in the progress of that indigenous American civilisation so singularly illustrative of the intellectual unity which binds together the divers races of man. A portion of the hieroglyphic inscription which accompanies the remarkable Palenque sculpture of a figure offering what has been assumed to represent an infant before a cross, will best suffice to illustrate the characteristics of this form of writing.”