When our friend entered the arena of Egyptological research the nature of the demotic writing was as yet entirely undetermined, for although the greatest Orientalist of this century, Silvestre de Sacy, had addressed his attention to the demotic portion of the Rosetta stone, and it had been examined not only by Thomas Young, but also by the sagacious Swede, Åkerblad, neither they nor Champollion had been able to come to any satisfactory understanding of it. Lepsius, also did little towards a more thorough comprehension of the nature of the demotic dialect and writing. It was H. Brugsch and E. Revillout who first discovered the significance of the demotic, and proved the importance of this “writing and language of the people” as a middle term between ancient Egyptian and Coptic. As far as this, (the Coptic), is concerned, it was the language used by the Egyptians in speaking and writing, after the introduction of Christianity into Egypt. It was written in Greek letters, with some additional alphabetical characters for sounds which the Hellenic alphabet would not reproduce. It represents the most recent dialect of the Egyptians, replete with many borrowed and alien words from the Greek, and it succeeded the demotic as this sprang from the ancient Egyptian language which was written in hieroglyphics. As we possess many of the Scriptural books in Coptic translations, and more recent Coptic manuscripts with an Arabic version in the margin, it is scarcely less intelligible for us than Greek and Arabic themselves. The church of the monophysitic Coptic Christians on the Nile employs it to-day in the liturgies according to which divine worship is conducted. The founder of a scientific knowledge of the Coptic language in Europe was the same Athanasius Kircher who attempted the deciphering of hieroglyphics without success. To him we are, however, indebted for the first Coptic vocabularies and essays at grammar, (these were taken from the Arabic, and written in Latin.) A succession of European scholars afterwards extended and perfected his work, which, although fundamental, was full of defects and errors. When Lepsius began the study of Coptic it had already been treated by Lacroze, Wilkins, Scholz, Woide, Tuki, Quatremère, and Zoega, in part grammatically, and in part lexicographically. Peyron’s lexicon was also approaching completion. No one had yet ventured to assign this language its proper scientific philological rank. Its three dialects had long been known, and not only Champollion, but Seyffarth also, had made use of them in the interpretation of the most ancient hieroglyphic words.