While British infidels were admiring the sacred writings of the Hindoos, and holding them up before the world as superior to the word of God, French skeptics were busy in a similar employment. When Napoleon invaded Egypt, in 1798, he took with him a large corps of scientific men. In the ceiling of a temple at Dendera, in Upper Egypt, some of these scientists discovered a stone, tablet covered with strange characters. These characters, it was concluded, were a representation of the relative positions of the sun, moon and stars at the time the temple was built; and, calculating backwards, it was found that this could not be less than seventeen thousand years ago. This tablet was taken from the ceiling of the temple and carried away to France, and placed in the national library in Paris. Hundreds of thousands came to see the antediluvian monument, and infidel commentators were never wanting to inform them that this remarkable stone proved the whole Bible to be a series of lies. One of the discoverers, afterwards {17} a professor in the University of Breslau, published a pamphlet, entitled, "Invincible proof that the earth is at least ten times older than is taught by the Bible." During the next thirty years, scores of such publications followed; and the base slander received many additions and improvements, until it was a common saying that this stone proved that "the priests of Egypt were carving astronomy on their pyramids ten thousand years before Adam was born." It did not shake their credulity in the least, that no two of their wise men were agreed by some thousands of years, how old the stone was--that no one even knew the first principles of the Egyptian system of astronomy, and that _none of them could read the hieroglyphics_. But, in 1832, the curious Egyptian astronomy was studied, and it then appeared that this object, which had caused so much commotion, was simply a calendar stone to aid in the measurement of time; and that the positions of the sun, moon and stars were so placed to enable common observers to ascertain the beginning of the year. At length, by means of the Rosetta Stone--which furnished a key to these hieroglyphics--Champolion and others learned to read the inscriptions on Egyptian monuments. [ILLUSTRATION: Rosetta Stone, showing present and original form, and specimens of Greek, Coptic and Hieroglyphic characters.]