With the appearance of the citizen king Lepsius’ exalted frame of mind is dissipated, and he tries to fix the note which he can designate as prevalent in the general din. With the aid of the interval between the lowest note of his own voice and the sound which formed the key-note of the clamor, he found it to be the treble _e_. Thus does the spirit of research ever demand her due of him. The linguist everywhere scrutinizes the value and significance of sounds and tones. He does not disdain to amuse himself with them occasionally, and to determine the relation between them and other perceptions of the senses. “_O_,” he writes at one time in his diary, “seems to me brown, _a_, light blue, _e_, colorless, a clear faint color, _i_, bright yellow.” At that time, while writing his essay on Sanscrit palaeography, he thought he discerned that in all languages the vowels had formed themselves by degrees, like colors, from the _a_, but that originally there had been no distinction between vowels and consonants. The words, he thought, had been divided according to their sounds, in such a way that each consonant with the vowel which followed it constituted an inseparable whole. Hence in Sanscrit _a_ originally was even considered as a consonant, or rather as _a_ combination of the Greek _Spiritus lenis_ and the _a_ which necessarily followed it. In Paris Lepsius is at first a linguist solely, and does not concern himself with Egyptological studies. But by the end of October, through Panofka, he is first invited to come to Italy in the name of Gerhard, who had kept him in mind since their meeting in Berlin, and then he receives a letter from the Alsatian Lobstein, who had met him in Paris, and who has been authorized by Bunsen and also by Kellermann to make him a serious proposition to come to Rome. There he is first to busy himself with a collection of Umbrian, Oscan, and Etruscan inscriptions, for which his dissertation would seem especially to qualify him, and secondly to devote himself seriously to the study of the writing and language of the ancient Egyptians. The first proposal is entirely acceptable to him from the beginning, although it is only for the sake of completeness that he will include in his _corpus inscriptionem_ the Etruscan inscriptions, on the deciphering of which “many a man may yet wear out his teeth.” The second proposition, on the contrary, causes him the most serious deliberation. It is true that Gerhard, through whom he had been most warmly commended to Bunsen, had already in Berlin urged him to the study of hieroglyphics, and had assured him that he should himself undertake it if he were but younger. It is also true that he felt his own powers had now become fit to cope with the greatest difficulties, but yet it seemed to him advisable to await the appearance of Champollion’s grammar, in order to learn how the matter actually stood. He could thence gather and decide whether the foundations had