story of Genesis; but the hieroglyphic and the cuneiform monuments have yielded up their long-buried testimony to justify the discredited chroniclers. Nothing in romance is more wonderful than the story of the work of interpretation, by which old Egypt and old Assyria have been brought forward into the light of authentic history. Two generations of acute and patient scholars working contemporaneously in England, France, Germany, and Italy, have contrived, without dictionary, without grammar, without even a key to the mysterious letters, to decipher and to read the stony records of those ancient empires. Their first labour was to distinguish the symbols, and to assign to them a phonetic value, then to compare the resultant words with the vocabulary of known languages supposed to be akin to the old {7}ones. In the case of the hieroglyphics, the Coptic language alone offered its aid, this being the tongue of Egypt as written and spoken in the first ten centuries of our era, genuine Egyptian indeed, but necessarily differing enormously from its earliest phases thousands of years back. As to the cuneiform inscriptions, the various Semitic tongues furnished means of comparison for Assyrian texts, the Persian and "Zend" for old Persic and Median, and certain cuneiform vocabularies were discovered which rendered it possible to understand a third language, the most ancient of them all, which had been utterly unknown even by name. From the time of Christ, perhaps even before it, down to sixty years ago, the languages and monuments of Egypt and Chaldæa had never been looked upon by the eye of intelligence. The mystery of ages is a mystery no more. _Writing in Chaldæa, 4000 B.C._