The decipherment of cuneiform inscriptions, and the study of Assyrian remains up to 1840--Ancient Iran and the Avesta--The survey of India and the study of Hindustani--The exploration and measurement of the Himalaya mountains--The Arabian Peninsula--Syria and Palestine--Central Asia and Alexander von Humboldt--Pike at the sources of the Mississippi, Arkansas, and Red River--Major Long's two expeditions-- General Cass--Schoolcraft at the sources of the Mississippi--The exploration of New Mexico--Archaeological expeditions in Central America--Scientific expeditions in Brazil--Spix and Martin--Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied--D'Orbigny and American man. Although the discoveries which we are now to relate are not strictly speaking geographical, they nevertheless throw such a new light on several early civilizations, and have done so much to extend the domain of history and ideas, that we are compelled to dedicate a few words to them. The reading of cuneiform inscriptions, and the decipherment of hieroglyphics are events so important in their results, they reveal to us so vast a number of facts hitherto unknown, or distorted in the more or less marvellous narratives of the ancient historians Diodorus, Ctesias, and Herodotus, that it is impossible to pass over scientific discoveries of such value in silence. Thanks to them, we form an intimate acquaintance with a whole world, with an extremely advanced civilization, with manners, habits, and customs differing essentially from our own. How strange it seems to hold in our hands the accounts of the steward of some great lord or governor of a province, or to read such romances as those of _Setna_ and the _Two Brothers_, or stories such as that of the _Predestined Prince_. Those buildings of vast proportions, those superb temples, magnificent hypogaea, and sculptured obelisks, were once nothing more to us than sumptuous monuments, but now that the inscriptions upon them have been read, they relate to us the life of the kings who built them, and the circumstances of their erection. How many names of races not mentioned by Greek historians, how many towns now lost, how many of the smallest details of the religion, art, and daily life, as well as of the political and military events of the past, are revealed to us by the hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions. Not only do we now see into the daily life of these ancient peoples, of whom we had formerly but a very superficial knowledge, but we get an idea even of their literature. The day is perhaps not far distant when we shall know as much of the life of the Egyptians in the eighteenth century before Christ as that of our forefathers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our own era.