to assign their correct places to the ruling families or dynasties, and to the several Pharaohs among them. It was easy to give their proper positions to the latter, as in the historical inscriptions are recorded the names of the Pharaohs under whom they were made. For such as were not dated the ingenuity and experience of the savant fixed their correct places according to the indications of style, or on palaeographic or other grounds. To the inquiry which of the achievements of Lepsius we consider the greatest, we do not hesitate to answer, the classification of his “Monuments,” when we consider the lamentable condition of Egyptian historical research at the time when it was produced, and the prodigious amount of new information to be reduced to order. In this work we see him surmount the mass of material which had been collected by his own energy, and transform the chaotic whole into a beautiful and faultlessly-proportioned organism. He never loses his broad outlook over the entire field, and nevertheless he gives the smallest detail its due with painstaking consciousness. We discern the divine likeness most clearly in a great man when he keeps in view the great whole, and yet does not disdain to give heed to small things; like the eternal and mysterious power which prescribes their wide and immutable orbits to the stars, and yet forgets not to give its antennae to the tiny insect. This colossal work is accompanied by no explanatory text,[63] and the excellence of the classification makes it easy to dispense with one. Each separate inscription can only be sought for in the place where it occurs, and the marginal notes inform us as to the locality whence it came, and the ruler under whom it originated. Whoever wishes to know to what period the Pharaoh in question should be assigned, must consult the Book of Kings, which was begun by Lepsius at an early date, and completed in 1859. He will there find the desired information. In the middle of the fiftieth year of this century, the time had not yet come for giving continuous and exact translations of great hieroglyphic texts, and therefore the editor of the “Monuments” wisely abstained from doing so. Such an undertaking would also have far exceeded the powers of one person. Even now an abundance of difficult problems are still presented to Egyptian philology, great as are the advances which that has made, by this unparalleled _corpus inscriptionum_. It contains the most important Egyptian inscriptions, from the most ancient times up to the period of the Roman emperors, classified in the most rigorously systematic manner. The “Monuments” is, and must ever remain, the chief and most fundamental work for the study of Egyptology.