Nobody, so far as I have myself read, has yet clearly explained why a wood shaving, or continuously driven portion of detached substance, should thus take a spiral course; nor why a substance like wax or water, capable of yielding to pressure, should rise or fall under a steady force in successive undulations. Leaving these questions for another time, observe that the first furrow, with the ridge at its side, represents the entire group of incised lines ploughed in soft grounds, the head of them all being the plough furrow itself. And the line produced by the flat side of the knife is the type of those produced by complete excision, the true engraver’s. Next, instead of wax, take a surface of wood, and, drawing first as deep and steady a furrow in it as you can with the edge of the knife, proceed to deepen it by successive cuts. You will, of course, find that you must cut from the two sides, sloping to the middle, forming always a deeper angular ditch; but you will have difficulty in clearing all out neatly at the two ends. And if you think of it, you will perceive that the simplest conceivable excision of a clear and neat kind must be that produced by three cuts given triangularly. [27] For though you can’t clear out the hollow with two touches, you need not involve yourself in the complexity of four. And unless you take great pains in keeping the three sides of this triangle equal, two will be longer than the third. So the type of the primitive incised mark is what grand persons call ‘cuneiform’—wedge-shaped. If you cut five such cuneiform incisions in a star group, thus, with a little circle connecting them in the middle, you will have the element of the decorative upper border both on the scribe’s coffin and the queen’s. You will also have an elementary picture of a starfish—or the portrait of the pentagonal and absorbent Adam and Eve who were your ancestors, according to Mr. Darwin. You will see, however, on the sarcophagi that the rays are not equidistant, but arranged so as to express vertical position,—of that afterwards; to-day observe only the manner of their cutting; and then on a flat surface of porphyry,—do the like yourself. You don’t know what porphyry is—nor where to get it? Write to Mr. Tennant, 149, Strand, and he will send you a little bit as cheap as he can. Then you must get a little vice to fix it, and a sharp-pointed little chisel, and a well-poised little hammer; and, when you have cut your asterisk, you will know more about Egypt than nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand,—Oxford scholars and all. Awaiting the result of your experiment, I proceed to the other instrument of writing, the reed, or pen. Of which the essential power is that it can make a narrow stroke sideways, and a broad one when you press it open.