These words are especially applicable to Egypt, where there is a complete sequence of many thousands of years of history, and where the historian may watch the Egyptian in his every mood, and may observe his actions under innumerable combinations of circumstances. The race has not changed its character since the days of the Pharaohs, and in order to know of what the nation is capable in the future we must ascertain what it has done in the past. It is our particular business in Egypt to work for the future, to build up a nation out of the wreck which confronted us in 1882; but, as Edmund Burke said, “people will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.” It is an incontestable fact that the contents of the ancient sepulchres do give us the material to form the basis of the only reasonable study of the Egyptian question--the study of the Present in the light of the Past with an eye to the Future. The records which are discovered in the tombs tell us what Egyptian individuals can accomplish ethically, while the antiquities themselves show us of what they are capable artistically, industrially, technically, and scientifically. It is to obtain this knowledge, and also, of course, to add to our general material for the study of art, religion, literature, and so forth, that the ancient tombs must be excavated and recorded, and the dead disturbed. Moreover, the mummies and bones of the dead men are of considerable value to science. The work of Professor G. Elliot Smith, F.R.S., and his assistants has led to most important discoveries in connection with the history of disease; and his minute examination of thousands of mummies has been most extraordinarily fruitful. Studies in the origin and growth of such diseases as tuberculosis or plague cannot fail to be of importance; but without the excavation of ancient tombs no such work can be undertaken. I venture to think, too, that the fight against disease is invigorated by the knowledge that certain maladies are of modern growth, and that the known world was at one time free of them.