The French soldiers were, as was natural, deeply mortified when they heard that the captors of Alexandria were to have the antiquities. Every man of them who had had to do with their excavation or transport had vindicated DENON’S eulogy by his pains to protect the sculptures from harm. Now, their excessive zeal and their national pride led to an unworthy result. The Rosetta stone was stripped of the soft cotton cloth and the thick matting in which it had been sedulously wrapped, and was thrown upon its face. Other choice antiquities were deprived of their wooden cases. [Sidenote: CAPTURE OF THE ROSETTA STONE;] When TURNER, with a detachment of artillerymen and a strong tumbril, went to the French head-quarters to receive the Rosetta stone, he had to pass through a lane of angry Frenchmen who crowded the narrow streets of Alexandria, and were not sparing in their epithets and sarcasms. Those artillerymen, too, were the first English soldiers who entered the city. When Colonel TURNER had gotten safely into his hands the stone destined to mark an era in philology, he returned good for evil. He permitted some members of the Institute of Egypt to take a cast of it, which they sent to Paris in lieu of the original. The Rosetta inscription had been found, by the French explorers, among the ruins of a fortification near the mouth of the Rosetta branch of the Nile. When they discovered it the stone was already broken, both at the top and at the right side. Of its triple inscription, commemorative of the beginning of the actual and personal reign of PTOLEMY EPIPHANES—and therefore cut nearly two hundred years before the Christian era—that in the hieroglyphic or sacred character had suffered most. The second or enchorial inscription was also mutilated in its upper portion. The Greek version was almost entire. The scarcely less famous Alexandrian sarcophagus was found by the French in the court-yard of a mosque called the ‘Mosque of St. Athanasius.’ [Sidenote: AND OF THE SARCOPHAGUS SOMETIMES CALLED ‘TOMB OF ALEXANDER.’] Of its discovery and state when found, the following account is given in the _Description de l’Egypte_:—A small octagonal building, covered with a cupola, had been constructed by the Moslems for their ablutions, and in this they had placed the sarcophagus to be used as a bath; piercing it for that purpose with large holes, but not otherwise injuring it. The sarcophagus is a monolith of dark-coloured breccia—such as the Italians call _breccia verde d’Egitto_—and is completely covered with hieroglyphics. [Sidenote: _Description de l’Egypte_, vol. v, pp. 373, seqq.; Plates and Append. (8vo edit.), 1829.] Their number, according to the French artist by whom impressions in sulphur were taken of the whole, exceeds 21,700. Dr. CLARKE’S identification of this monument as the tomb of Alexander has not been supported by later Egyptologists.