Champollion in his "Grammaire Egyptienne," issued after the author's death in 1836, gave descriptive names to large numbers of the signs. In 1848, to the first volume of Bunsen's "Egypt's Place in Universal History," Birch contributed a long list of hieroglyphics, with descriptions and statements of their separate phonetic and ideographic values. De Rouge, in his "Catalogue des signes hieroglyphiques de l'imprimerie nationale," 1851, attached to each of many hundreds of signs and varieties of signs a short description, often very correct. He again dealt with the subject in 1867, and published a "Catalogue Raisonne" of the more usual signs in the first _livraison_ of his "Chrestomathie Egyptienne." Useful to the student as these first lists were, in the early stages of decipherment, they are now of little value. For, at the time they were made, the fine early forms were mostly unstudied, and the signs were taken without discrimination from texts of all periods; moreover, the outlines of the signs were inaccurately rendered, their colours unnoted, and their phonetic and ideographic powers very imperfectly determined. Thus, whenever doubt was possible as to the object represented by a sign, little external help was forthcoming for correct identification. To a present-day student of the subject, the scholarly understanding of De Rouge and the ingenuity of Birch are apparent, but the aid which they afford him is small. As a result of recent discoveries, some very interesting researches have been made in Egyptian paleography in what is known as the _signary_.* We reach signs which seem to be disconnected from the known hieroglyphs, and we are probably touching on the system of geometrical signs used from prehistoric to Roman times in Egypt, and also in other countries around the Mediterranean. * The information regarding the alphabet here given is derived from the Eighteenth Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1899-1890.