In 1798 M. Boussard discovered near Rosetta, situated at one of the mouths of the Nile, a large polished stone of black granite, known as "The Rosetta Stone." This celebrated monument it appears was set up in the temple of Tum at Heliopolis about 200 B.C., in honour of Ptolemy V., according to a solemn decree of the united priesthood in synod at Memphis. On its discovery, the stone was presented to the French Institute at Cairo; but on the capture of Alexandria by the British in 1801, and the consequent defeat of the French troops, the Rosetta Stone came into the possession of the English general, and was presented by him to King George III. The king in turn presented the precious relic to the nation, and the stone is now in safe custody in the British Museum. [Illustration: THE ROSETTA STONE.] The Rosetta Stone has opened the sealed book of hieroglyphics, and enabled the learned to understand the long-forgotten monumental inscriptions. On the stone is a trigrammatical inscription, that is, an inscription thrice repeated in three different characters; the first in pure hieroglyphs, the second in Demotic, and the third in Greek. The French savants made the first attempt at deciphering it; but they were quickly followed by German, Italian, Swedish, and English scholars. Groups of characters on the stone were observed amid the hieroglyphs to correspond to the words, Alexander, Alexandria, Ptolemy, king, etc., in the Greek inscription. Many of the opinions expressed were very conflicting, and most of them were ingenious conjectures. A real advance was made in the study when, in 1818, Dr. Young, a London physician, announced that many of the characters in the group that stood for Ptolemy must have a phonetic value, somewhat after the manner of our own alphabet. M. Champollion, a young French savant, deeply interested in Egyptology, availed himself of Dr. Young's discovery, and pursued the study with ardent perseverance. In 1822 another inscribed monument was found at Philæ, in Upper Egypt, which rendered substantial help to such Egyptologists as were eagerly striving to unravel the mystery of the hieroglyphs. It was a small obelisk with a Greek inscription at the base, which inscription turned out to be a translation of the hieroglyphs on the obelisk. Champollion found on the obelisk a group of hieroglyphs which stood for the Greek name Kleopatra; and by carefully comparing this group with a group on the Rosetta Stone that stood for Ptolemy, he was able to announce that Dr. Young's teaching was correct, inasmuch as many of the hieroglyphs in the royal names are alphabetic phonetics, that is, each represents a letter sound, as in the case of our own alphabet.