The excavator must be prepared to record everything he sees, and his general knowledge must be such that he will not, by ignorance of what to search for, overlook matters of this kind; for it is a patent fact that, in general, we do not see what we do not look for. The number of tombs in Egypt is limited, and the person who excavates any one of them has an opportunity for observation which can never be exactly repeated. When he has removed the antiquities to the museum he has necessarily obliterated for ever the source of his information, and, unless the contents of the tomb are all duly photographed and recorded _in situ_, that obliteration is as calamitous as the actual destruction of the antiquities themselves. He may carry off to his museum, let us say, four bronze statuettes of no particular artistic merit or individuality. Their real value to the scholar may have rested almost solely in the fact that they stood at the four corners of the tomb to ward off the evil spirits of the north, south, east, and west; and it is that piece of information rather than the somewhat mediocre objects themselves which must at all costs be preserved. Thus the responsibility of the excavator is very great, and he must honestly feel capable of meeting the demands which such work makes upon him, and must enter upon his labours _in full consciousness of his obligations to the public_. It may fall to his lot to dig through the stratified remains of a Roman fortress in order to reach the ruins of an Egyptian temple buried far below. To a large extent the Roman walls and buildings must be destroyed, and scholars will afterwards possess only so much information regarding the fortress as the excavator has had the ability to record. If his notes are incomplete, then he may justly be accused of destroying valuables which can never be replaced; and I can see very little difference between him and the crazy villain who cuts a slice out of a famous painting or smashes the nose off a statue. The rarity of antiquities and ancient remains constitutes their special value. Information once destroyed can never be recovered. A stroke of the spade or pick, made before the necessary records are taken, may nullify the labours of many an ancient Egyptian’s lifetime. An old priest’s philosophy may have been summed up in the burial of a magical figure of Osiris in the earth floor under his bed as a protection against evil, and a too hasty stroke of the pick may lay bare the statuette but at the same time obliterate the traces of the position of the bed, thus rendering the magical little god as meaningless as the thousands of others just like it which line our museum shelves. The point of an arrow lying below the dust of a royal skeleton may be shown by close observation to have been the cause of death, and a fact will thus be added to history which might have been lost had a rough hand scattered the ashes.