In 1799, in the course of excavations at the fort of St. Julienne at Rosetta, in the northern Delta, the French officer of engineers, Boussard, had found the remarkable tablet which was to become so famous under the name of the Rosetta stone. The fortunes of war carried this one monument alone, not to Paris, but to London, where it is worthily conserved in the British Museum. It contains a sacerdotal decree, which awards high honors to the fifth Ptolemy, Epiphanes, for his great worth, and the benefits which he conferred on the country. It is written in three different characters and languages. Let us imagine, instead of the Egypt of that period, an Italian province of the Austrian monarchy, and let us suppose that the clergy of the place had drawn up a decree in honor of the imperial house; this might perhaps be published in the old ecclesiastical language, Latin, in Italian, and in the German language of the ruling house and its officials. Precisely thus was the decree of Rosetta written; first in the sacred language of the church, habitually rendered in the ancient hieroglyphic character, and only employed in ecclesiastical writings, next in the dialect current among the people, the demotic, which was recorded in a special abbreviated character in which the original form of the hieroglyphics is no longer to be recognized, and finally in the Greek language and character of the Lagid ruling house and its functionaries. Thus the Rosetta stone offered for investigation three tolerably long texts, the first two of which had for foundation a dialect of the ancient Egyptian language. These were in the two kinds of writing, the distinction between which had already been noted by the Greeks, (Herodotus, Diodorus, Clemens of Alexandria, etc.) and beneath them stood the Greek translation. In a special treatise,[13] to which the reader is referred, we have endeavored to show how two scholars, working independently, arrived simultaneously at the same result of correctly deciphering the principal hieroglyphic groups by a comparison of the names of the Ptolemy, of Cleopatra and of Alexander,[14] which were distinguished by being enclosed within elliptical ovals (cartouches), and appeared on the bi-lingual tablet in both hieroglyphic and Greek text. These two scholars were the gifted Frenchman, Champollion, and the Englishman, Thomas Young, an investigator of the first rank, whom difficulties served only to allure, and whose labors in the domain of physiology and optics would have assured him an immortal name. But Young arrived at results which were inaccurate in detail, chiefly by means of mechanical and arithmetical comparison, and then pursued his acquisitions no further, while Champollion applied all the energies of his lifetime to the prosecution and development of his epoch-making discovery. For this reason we ascribe it to him more willingly and with greater justice than to Thomas Young, who, however,