This curious case of the production of sounds in granite rocks at sunrise might have been regarded as a transatlantic wonder which was not applicable to Egypt; but by a singular coincidence of observation, Messrs. Jomard, Jollois, and Devilliers, who were travelling in Egypt nearly about the same time that M. Humboldt was traversing the wilds of South America, heard, _at sunrise, in a monument of granite_, situated near the centre of the spot on which the palace of Carnac stands, _a noise resembling that of a breaking string_, the very expression by which Pausanias characterizes the sound in the Memnonian granite. The travellers regarded these sounds as arising from the transmission of rarefied air through the crevices of a sonorous stone, and they were of the same opinion with Humboldt, that these sounds might have _suggested_ to the Egyptian priests _the juggleries of the Memnonium_. Is it not strange that the Prussian and the French travellers should not have gone a step farther, and solved the problem of two thousand years, by maintaining that the sound of the statue of Memnon was itself a natural phenomenon, or a granitic sound elicited at sunrise by the very same causes which operated on the Orinoco and in the temple of Carnac, in place of regarding it as a trick in imitation of natural sounds? If, as Humboldt supposes, the ancient inhabitants of Egypt had, in passing incessantly up and down the Nile, become familiar with the music of the granite rocks of the Thebaid, how could the imitation of such natural and familiar sounds be regarded by the priests as a means of deceiving the people? There could be nothing marvellous in a colossal statue of granite giving out the very same sounds that were given out at the same time of the day by a granite rock; and in place of reckoning it a supernatural fact, they could regard it in no other light than as the duplicate of a well-known natural phenomenon. It is a mere conjecture, however, that such sounds were common in the Thebaid; and it is therefore probable that a granite rock, possessing the property of emitting sounds at sunrise, had been discovered by the priests, who were at the same time the philosophers of Egypt, and that the block had been employed in the formation of the Memnonian statue for the purpose of impressing upon it a supernatural character, and enabling them to maintain their influence over a credulous people.