But, though Young was essentially a scientific man, his accomplishments were all but universal, and any memoir of him would be very incomplete without some sketch of his researches in Egyptian hieroglyphics. His classical training, his extensive knowledge of European and Eastern languages, and his neat handwriting and drawing, have already been referred to. To these attainments must be added his scientific _method_ and power of careful and systematic observation, and it will be seen that few persons could come to the task of deciphering an unknown language with a better chance of success than Dr. Young. The Rosetta Stone was found by the French while excavating at Fort St. Pierre, near Rosetta, in 1799, and was brought to England in 1802. The stone bore an inscription in three different kinds of character--the Hieroglyphic, the Enchorial or Demotic, and the ordinary Greek. Young's attention was first called to the Egyptian characters by a manuscript which was submitted to him in 1814. He then obtained copies of the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone and subjected them to a careful analysis. The latter part of the Greek inscription was very much injured, but was restored by the conjectures of Porson and Heyne, and read as follows:--"What is here decreed shall be inscribed on a block of hard stone, in sacred, in enchorial, and in Greek characters, and placed in each temple, of the first, second, and third gods." This indicated that the three inscriptions contained the same decree, but, unfortunately, the beginnings of the first and second inscriptions were lost, so that there were no very definitely fixed points to start upon. The words "Alexander" and "Alexandria," however, occurred in the Greek, and these words, being so much alike, might be recognized in each of the other inscriptions. The word "Ptolemy" appeared eleven times in the Greek inscription, and there was a word which, from its length and position, seemed to correspond to it, which, however, appeared fourteen times in the hieroglyphic inscription. This word, whenever it appeared in the hieroglyphics, was surrounded by a ring forming what Champollion called a _cartouche_, which was always employed to denote the names of royal persons. These words were identified by Baron Sylvestre de Sacy and the Swedish scholar Akerblad. Young appears to have started with the idea, then generally current, that hieroglyphic symbols were purely ideographic, each sign representing a word. His knowledge of Chinese, however, led him to modify this view. In that language native words are represented by single symbols, but, when it is necessary to write a foreign word, a group of word-symbols is employed, each of which then assumes a phonetic character of the same value as the initial letter of the word which it represents. The phonetic value of these signs is indicated in Chinese by a line at the side, or by enclosing them in a square. Young