It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this discovery. It contained in its single self the possibility of the whole of science, art, law, religion, history, beyond their merest rudiments, which were all that would have been attainable without it. It contained all this as completely as the acorn contains the oak. Where, and what would any and every one of them now be were it not for that discovery? Indeed, what does it not contain? There are now 31,000,000 souls within the United Kingdom, had it not been for that discovery probably there would not have been 3,000,000. Neither the readers nor the writer of this book would have existed. None of the existing population of Europe would have seen the light. Other combinations would have taken place. Europe would be sparsely tenanted by tribes of rude barbarians—only a little less rude in its favoured southern clime. The New World would be still unknown. On the day some Egyptian priest, perhaps at This, thought out a scheme for representing words and sounds by signs, Christianity, the British Constitution, and the steam-engine became possible. With respect to so great, so all-important a discovery, one on which the destinies of the human race so entirely depended, every particular of its history must be deeply interesting. Of one particular, however, at all events, we are certain: we know where it had its birth. And this is what has made so many in all times desire to visit Egypt. It was that they wished to see the land of those who had conferred this much-containing gift upon mankind—not all of them seeing this distinctly, yet having a kind of intuition that the wisdom of the Egyptians was a mighty wisdom to which civilization, through this discovery, owed itself. We know, too, another particular, and that is, that this discovery was first used for sacred and religious purposes; and it must have been invented for the purposes for which it was first used. We can imagine what prompted the thought that issued in the discovery. We can trace out what it was that set the discovering mind at work. It must have been some idea in Egypt that was more active, and so more productive than ideas that were stirring in men’s minds elsewhere. It must have been some need in Egypt that spurred men on more than the needs felt elsewhere. And this idea could only have been that of the future life; and this need that which arose out of this idea, the need of recording the laws it prompted, and the ritual which grew out of it; and of aiding, embellishing, and advancing in their general laws, their religious observances, their arts, and what afterwards became their science and their history, the whole life of the people which was struggling to rise into higher conditions, more worthy of their great idea.