It is now some time since the public prints have announced another trilinguar inscription, engraved on a stone in one of the mosks at Cairo. As the stone itself, on account of its position, was not allowed to be removed, a correct fac simile of the three inscriptions is, perhaps, at this moment on its way to Europe. Should it ever reach our shores, I have no doubt that the interpretation will furnish us with further proofs, if proofs should still be wanting, of the correctness and reality of the modern discoveries, which, notwithstanding their success, are still looked upon by some sceptics with an incredulous eye.; so difficult is it to convince men who will not be convinced.

With these observations I conclude for the present, at least, our research into the enchorial, or demotic characters. I shall hereafter revert to them again, when I shall have occasion to exhibit to you a more complete alphabet of these, as well as hieratic letters; but for the present we must confine our attention to hieroglyphics, properly so called.

In these, the success of Dr. Young was neither so certain, nor so extensive; yet the merit alone of having first thought of ascertaining, by fact, the opinion of Zoëga and Warburton, to read hieroglyphics, as letters, and actually spell the names of Berenice and Ptolemy, is, after all, so great, as to counterbalance every possible mistake; for it was upon this discovery that M. Champollion afterwards engrafted his system, and was enabled to carry

his researches into Egyptian antiquities, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the truly astonishing degree which he has done.

In these tables you will see the illustration of my assertion. [Table 1st, fig. 1 and 2. In the groups contained in these two ovals, Dr. Young was the first who ascertained that they expressed the names of Berenice [fig. 1.] and of Ptolemy [fig. 2.]; and what is more, he gave to each hieroglyphic, or character, a proper and distinct value, and an individual import. As the learned Doctor proceeded upon guess and supposition, it could not be expected that he should never be wrong; he, in fact, was wrong in the explanation of some of the characters, but he certainly was right on the whole. In the name of Ptolemy, for instance, [fig. 2.] he read the square for P; the half circle for T; the lion for the syllable le, or ole; the three sides of the parallelogram for M; the two feathers for E; and the crooked line for os; which, altogether, he supposed made up the name of Ptolemeos.

In the name of Berenice, [fig. 1.] he also endeavoured to find out the import of each separate hieroglyphic, and read, or rather suspected, that the box represented the syllable Bir; the mouth, or double oval, the letter E; the undulating line the N; the two feathers the C; and the goose the syllable ken, or cen; and thus he made out the name of Bireneken, or Birenicen.

In both these ovals, Dr. Young considered the

knot and the bridge as useless; which was wrong, as further discoveries have proved that the first stands for an o, and the second for a k. And again, he thought that some of the characters, such as the box, the goose, the lion, and the crooked line were syllables, when in reality they are simple letters, as both the names of Ptolemy and Berenice are not spelt Berenicen and Ptolemeos, but Brnks and Ptolmes, according to the oriental mode of leaving out the intermediate vowels. But we are to consider that this was the very first attempt ever made at assigning a fixed alphabetical value to hieroglyphics; for although Mr. Bankes had asserted, since the year 1818, that the characters contained in this oval [fig. 3.] represented the name of Cleopatra, as we shall see in our next Lecture, yet he had not assigned a characteristic import to any of the signs, nor had he said that each of these signs was a letter. Champollion did so, and it was then that he found that the lion was an L, and not a syllable.

Besides these things already enumerated, Dr. Young also discovered the meaning, and interpreted the signification of seventy-seven more simple characters, and groups consisting of several characters, together with the feminine termination invariably attached to names of females, whether goddesses, private individuals, or princesses, which are the oval and the half circle, a termination indicating the female sex [Table 1. fig. 15.]; the whole of which he published in the fourth volume

of the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, which I have already noticed.

It is true, that in these important discoveries, Dr. Young seemed to give the meaning of these hieroglyphical groups taken all together, without assigning a proper value to each of the characters; nor did he mark the alphabet of hieroglyphics in the same way as he had done that of the enchorial or demotic: but still it was he who made the first important step; for it was Dr. Young who first ascertained that many simple objects were represented by pictures, that is, by their actual delineations; that many other objects were used in a figurative sense only; while a great number of the symbols could be considered as pictures of no existing objects whatever.

Again, it was Dr. Young who first found out the marks or signs for numbers, that two objects were denoted by the repetition of the same character; that an indefinite plurality was represented by three characters of the same kind following each other; that definite numbers were expressed by upright strokes for units; and arches, either round or angular, for tens, such as I offer you in this table. [Table 1st.]

The units are expressed by single upright strokes, [fig. 4.] and they are always repeated to mark any number below ten,which is represented by an arch, either round or angular, No. e. The repetition of these produces the repetition of as many tens up to ninety. A hundred is exhibited by a figure

very much resembling our nine, No. g. This same figure is again repeated for every hundred for any number below one thousand, which has a character of its own, to which hangs a cross, No. h. Thus to express the numbers two, three, four, seven, &c. alike, we are to mark two, three, four, or seven upright strokes. To signify twenty, or thirty, or ninety, we are to write two, three, or nine, angular or round arches. The Number 42, for instance, No. ƒ, is expressed by four arches, which mean four times ten, forty; and by two upright strokes, which make two.

To signify the ordinal numbers, we are to place at the top of each of the numbers the figure marked No. b; and thus No. a becomes the first, No. c the second, No. f will become the fortysecond, and the like; and if we change this figure into a kind of three sides of a square, No. d, then the numbers will signify the first time, the second time, the third time, and so on.

Again, it seems that the same gentleman first discovered the real expression, or hieroglyphic characters, employed to express several letters, such as N. M. P. T. F. as they are marked in the names of Berenice and Ptolemy. They may be, and often are, expressed by other signs besides these marked by Dr. Young; yet it was a great matter, when no one ever dreamt of a hieroglyphical alphabet, to discover a few characters for some of the letters.

t

Dr. Young also found out, or rather verified