Flinders Petrie is one of the outstanding explorers of the ruins of Egypt. He started with an innate genius for the work, and to this genius he added a sound scientific knowledge and an all-round mastery of his subject. He used his muscles as well as his brain, and he preferred to trust his own trained eyes to those of his native diggers. He went to Egypt with hands that were soft, unused to manual labour. He knew how often careless workmen have ruined things by striking them with their picks, and the first thing he did was to make a rule that directly anything peeped out of the sand, he would himself uncover the object to prevent it being injured. He began tracing the contours of the things in the soil, digging away with his fingers and scratching away with his nails, his hands perhaps buried up to the wrist in sand. Thus he would clear an object a little at a time, so carefully that it could not possibly suffer damage. But his hands were not made for such work. Finger-nails of steel and a skin of tanned leather were needed to grub about in the sands of the desert. No wonder that his fingers became frightfully sore and tender, that his nails were almost worn away by continual contact with the sand. That was one of the minor hardships of such work, a discomfort that he treated lightly. The soreness of his hands did not prevent him from using them as digging implements, and in a week or two he was having a personal lesson in evolution. Soft hands were useless to him in such a task. So nature quickly readjusted itself to the different circumstances and evolved hard hands for him, toughened the skin of the palms and back and tempered the finger-nails until he could rummage about all day in the sand with absolute impunity, running no more risk of injuring his fingers than if he were actually wearing thick leather gloves. When he turned his attention to Abydos in Southern Egypt, he found a Frenchman had been granted the privilege of exploring the spot. Amelineau was installed at Abydos. He had dug away for four years, finding tombs and exploring them, and adding a little to the sum total of the knowledge of Egypt. The Egyptian Government gave Amelineau a five years’ concession, and at the end of the fourth year’s work he surveyed the site. He went over it, looked at the mountains of rubbish his diggers had shifted, summed up his discoveries, and at last concluded that it was useless digging there any longer. He decided that he had explored the place thoroughly, and had found all that existed there. Not one man in a thousand would have thought it worth while to look for anything at Abydos after that. Apparently the field had been thoroughly explored and worked out. But Flinders Petrie happened to be the one man who thought otherwise. While he respected the opinion of the Frenchman, he yet felt that here was a field for further investigation, that Abydos had not yielded up all its secrets to the previous seekers.