"Leaving now all the monumental age, we come lastly to the evidences of the Christian period, preserved in the papyri or miscellaneous waste papers left behind in the towns of the Roman times. Last winter my friends, Mr. Grenfell and Mr. Hunt, cleared out the remains of the town Behnesa, about 110 miles south of Cairo. There, amid thousands of stray papers, documents, rolls, accounts, and all the waste sweepings out of the city offices, they found two leaves which are priceless in Christian literature—the leaf of Logia, or sayings of Jesus, and the leaf of Matthew's Gospel. The leaf of the Logia is already so widely known that it is needless for me to describe it. … The leaf of Matthew's Gospel is of great interest in the literary history of the Gospels. Hitherto we have had no manuscripts older than the second great ecclesiastical settlement under Theodosius. Now we have a piece two ages earlier—before the first settlement of things under Constantine at the council of Nicea. Here, in the middle of the third century, we find that the beginning of the Gospel, the most artificial, and probably the latest, part, the introductory genealogy and account of the Nativity, was exactly in its present form. This gives us the greatest confidence that the Gospel as we have it dates from the time of the great persecutions. Such are some of the astonishing and far-reaching results that Egypt has given us within three years past." _W. M. Flinders Petrie, Recent Research in Egypt (Sunday School Times, February 19, 1898.)_ In a later article, contributed to the "Popular Science Monthly," Professor Petrie has described more fully the results of recent exploration in Egypt, especially with reference to the discovery and study of prehistoric remains. The following are passages from the article: "The great stride that has been made in the last six years is the opening up of prehistoric Egypt, leading us back some 2000 years before the time of the pyramid builders. Till recently nothing was known before the age of the finest art and the greatest buildings, and it was a familiar puzzle how such a grand civilization could have left no traces of its rise. This was only a case of blindness on the part of explorers. Upper Egypt teems with prehistoric remains, but, as most of what appears is dug up by plunderers for the market, until there is a demand for a class of objects, very little is seen of them. Now that the prehistoric has become fashionable, it is everywhere to be seen. The earlier diggers were dazzled by the polished colossi, the massive buildings, the brilliant sculptures of the well-known historic times, and they had no eyes for small graves, containing only a few jars or, at best, a flint knife. {20}