The dial, or gold circle of Osimandyas, shews what an immense progress they had made in astronomy in so little time. This, too, is a proof of an early fall and revival of the arts in Egypt, for the knowledge and use of Armillæ had been lost with the destruction of Thebes, and were not again discovered, that is, revived, till the reign of Ptolemy Soter, 300 years before the Christian æra. I consider that immense quantity of hieroglyphics, with which the walls of the temples, and faces of the obelisks, are covered, as containing so many astronomical observations. I look upon these as the ephemerides of some thousand years, and that sufficiently accounts for their number. Their date and accuracy were indisputable; they were exhibited in the most public places, to be consulted as occasion required; and, by the deepness of the engraving, and hardness of the materials, and the thickness and solidity of the block itself upon which they were carved, they bade defiance at once to violence and time. I know that most of the learned writers are of sentiments very different from mine in these respects. They look for mysteries and hidden meanings, moral and philosophical treatises, as the subjects of these hieroglyphics. A sceptre, they say, is the hieroglyphic of a king. But where do we meet a sceptre upon an antique Egyptian monument? or who told us this was an emblem of royalty among the Egyptians at the time of the first invention of this figurative writing? Again, the serpent with the tail in its mouth denotes the eternity of God, that he is without beginning and without end. This is a Christian truth, and a Christian belief, but no where to be found in the polytheism of the inventors of hieroglyphics. Was Cronos or Ouranus without beginning and without end? Was this the case with Osiris and Tot, whose fathers and mothers births and marriages are known? If this was a truth, independent of revelation, and imprinted from the beginning in the minds of men; if it was destined to be an eternal truth, which must have appeared by every man finding it in his own breast, from the beginning, how unnecessary must the trouble have been to write a common known truth like this, at the expence of six weeks labour, upon a table of porphyry or granite.