What is needed for the validity of this argument is a concurrence, which could not possibly be fortuitous, between the clear and undoubted testimony of Manetho and of the monuments. But first of all, what sort of probability is there left of our possessing anything approximately like the results of Manetho: and if we had them, of their historical accuracy? Secondly, is it at all credible that so fragmentary and fortuitous a record as survives in monuments (allowing again their very dubious historical worth) should just happen to coincide with the surviving fragments of our patch-work Manetho, king for king and dynasty for dynasty, as Mr. Laing would have us believe? On the contrary, nothing would throw more suspicion on the interpretation of these monuments than the assertion of such an improbable coincidence. What, then, is the force of this argument from Egyptology? _If_ the records from which Manetho compiled were historically accurate; _if_ he was perfectly competent to understand them; _if_ he was scrupulously honest and critical; _if_ from the tampered-with fragments in the Christian Fathers we can arrive at a reliable and accurate knowledge of his results; and _if_ the Bible in the original text--whatever that may be--undoubtedly asserts that man was not created till 4000 B.C., then according to certain Egyptologists (Boeck), Menes reigned fifteen hundred years previously, and according to others (Wilkinson), one thousand years subsequently. Similarly as to the argument from coincidence: _if_, as before, we possess Manetho's genuine list intact, and _if_ we have the clear testimony of the monuments giving a precisely similar record, this coincidence, apart from all independent value to be given to Manetho or to the monuments, is an effect demanding a cause, for which the most probable is the objective truth from which both these veracious records have been copied. But the monuments are not written in plain English, and need a key; and we must be first assured that Manetho's list has not been used for this purpose. We are told; for example, [55] that the name "Snefura," deciphered on a tablet found at the copper-mines of Wady Magerah, is the name of a King of the third dynasty, who reigned about 4000 B.C. Now _if_ there were no doubt about the reading of this name on the tablet, and _if_ his date and dynasty were as plainly there recorded, and _if_ all this tallies exactly with equally precise particulars in Manetho's list, it would indeed be a remarkable coincidence and would imply some common source, whether record or fact. But if having credited Manetho with the record of such a name and date, one tortures a hieroglyph into a faintly similar name, and concludes at once that the same name must be the same person, and that therefore this is the oldest record in the world, the confirmation is not so striking. That it is so in this instance we do not affirm; but we should need the assertion of a man of more intellectual sobriety than Mr.