Diodorus gives us very much the same narratives as those of Herodotus; and, on the whole, we had to fall back on Manetho as the only authority for anything like precise dates and connected history. Manetho's dates, however, were so inconsistent with preconceived ideas based on the chronology of the Bible, that they were universally thought to be fabulous. They were believed either to represent the exaggerations of Egyptian priests desirous of magnifying the antiquity of their country, or, if historical, to give in succession the names of a number of kings and dynasties who had really reigned simultaneously in different provinces. So stood the question until the discovery of reading hieroglyphics enabled us to test the accuracy of Manetho's lists by the light of contemporary monuments and manuscripts. This discovery is of such supreme importance that it may be well to begin at the beginning, and lay a solid foundation by showing how it was made, and the demonstration on which it rests. Reading presupposes writing, as writing presupposes speech. Ideas are conveyed from one mind to another in speech through the ear, in writing through the eye. The origin of the latter method is doubtless to be found in picture-writing. The palæolithic savage who drew a mammoth with the point of a flint on a piece of ivory, was attempting to write, in his rude way, a record of some memorable chase. And the accounts of the old Empires of Mexico and Peru at the time of the Spanish Conquest, show that a considerable amount of civilization can be attained and information conveyed by this primitive method. But for the purpose of historical record more is required. It is essential to have a system of signs and symbols which shall be generally understood, and by which knowledge shall be handed down unchanged to successive generations. All experience shows that before knowledge is thus fixed and recorded, anything that may be transmitted by memory and word of mouth, fades off almost immediately into myth, and leaves no certain record of time, place, and circumstance. A few religious hymns and prayers like those of the Vedas, a few heroic ballads like those of Homer, a few genealogies like those of Agamemnon or Abraham, may be thus preserved, but nothing definite or accurate in the way of fact and date. History, therefore, begins with writing, and writing begins with the invention of fixed signs to represent words. A system of writing is possible, like the Chinese, in which each separate word has its own separate sign, but this is extremely cumbrous, and quite unintelligible to those who have not got a living key to explain the meaning of each symbol. It is calculated that an educated Chinese has to learn by heart the meaning of some 15,000 separate signs before he can read and write correctly. We have a trace of this ideographic system in our own language, as where arbitrary signs such as 1, 2, 3, represent