figures in temple sculptures; and Akerblad, who published an alphabet of the demotic characters on the Rosetta Stone. Dr. Thomas Young was a very remarkable man. Born of Quaker parents in 1773, he gave his youth to literature, languages, and mechanics, and at thirty won the Fellowship of the Royal Society, having two years before then accepted the Professorship of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution. Made easy in circumstances by a legacy from a relative, he applied himself yet more strenuously to physics and philology. The result of his labours in the one was the discovery of the undulatory nature of light (which has its analogy in sound-waves), in opposition to Newton's corpuscular or emission theory; and, in the other, a partial decipherment of the demotic characters, and correct identification of the names of a few of the Egyptian gods--Rā, Nut, Thoth, Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys--and of the names Ptolemy and Berenice. He died in 1829. Jean François Champollion, of whom Dr. Wallis Budge speaks as "the immortal discoverer of a correct system of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics," was born in 1790. Like Young, he betook himself early to the study of languages, and at the age of thirteen was "master of a fair knowledge of Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee." In his twenty-second year he became Professor of Ancient History to the Faculty of Letters at Grenoble, and, with a certain impulse to the quest given by acquaintance with the labours of Young and others, he revised their system and developed his own, making tours to the museums of Turin, Rome, and Naples for the study of papyri, and passing thence to Egypt, where he secured a large body of materials. Death overtook him in 1832, but not before he had accomplished the chief aim of his life in demonstrating that the hieroglyphic characters are partly pictures of objects and partly signs of sounds. Although the Rosetta Stone was the base of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the success following Champollion's labours is largely due to the discovery of a small obelisk in the island of Philæ. This obelisk was said to have been fixed in a socket bearing a Greek inscription containing a petition of the priests of Isis at Philæ, addressed to Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his sister, and to Cleopatra his wife. The hieroglyphic inscription upon the obelisk itself included certain characters within a cartouche which were identical with those within the only cartouche occurring on the Rosetta Stone. Here, then, was a clue, which was the more easily followed up because the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra have, in the Greek, certain letters in common which could be used for comparison with the hieroglyphics. "If the characters which are similar in these two names express the same sound in each cartouche, their purely phonetic character is at once made clear," and the recovery of the Egyptian alphabet was only a question of time (figs. 47, 48, 49). [Illustration: Fig. 47.--PTOLEMY]