* We know the words which Plato puts into the mouth of an Egyptian priest: "O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children, and there is no old man who is a Greek! You are all young in mind; there is no opinion or tradition of knowledge among you which is white with age." Other nations disputed their priority--the Phrygians, the Medes, or rather the tribe of the Magi among the Medes, the Ethiopians, the Scythians. A cycle of legends had gathered about this subject, giving an account of the experiments instituted, by Psamtik, or other sovereigns, to find out which were right, Egyptians or foreigners. ** At Philae and at Denderah, Phtah is represented as piling upon his potter's table the plastic clay from which he is about to make a human body, and which is somewhat wrongly called the egg of the world. It is really the lump of earth from which man came forth at his creation. *** At Philas, Khnumu calls himself "the potter who fashions men, the modeller of the gods." He there moulds the members of Osiris, the husband of the local Isis, as at Erment he forms the body of Harsamtaui, or rather that of Ptolemy Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and the celebrated Cleopatra, identified with Harsamtaui. Ra at his first rising, seeing the earth desert and bare, had flooded it with his rays as with a flood of tears; all living things, vegetable and animal, and man himself, had sprung pell-mell from his eyes, and were scattered abroad with the light over the surface of the world.[*] Sometimes the facts were presented under a less poetic aspect. The mud of the Nile, heated to excess by the burning sun, fermented and brought forth the various races of men and animals by spontaneous generation, having moulded itself into a thousand living forms. Then its procreative power became weakened to the verge of exhaustion. Yet on the banks of the river, in the height of summer, smaller animals might still be found whose condition showed what had once taken place in the case of the larger kinds. Some appeared as already fully formed, and struggling to free themselves from the oppressive mud; others, as yet imperfect, feebly stirred their heads and fore feet, while their hind quarters were completing their articulation and taking shape within the matrix of earth.[**] * With reference to the substances which proceeded from the eye of Ra, see the remarks of Birch, _Sur un papyrus magique du Musee Britannique_. By his tears (_romitu_) Horus, or his eye as identified with the sun, had given birth to all men, Egyptians (_romitu, rotu_), Libyans, and Asiatics, excepting only the negroes. The latter were born from another part of his body by the same means as those employed by Atumu in the creation of Shu and Tafnuit.