92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



celebrated memoir of 1806. It was Bonaparte who proposed to 

 award a gold medal to Volta, after reading his memoir on galvan- 

 ism ; and later induced Volta, by emoluments and titles, to sur- 

 render his Italian professorship for a residence in Paris. When 

 the memorable expedition to Egypt set sail, Bonaparte took with 

 him many savants and Academicians. After the wager of battle 

 had turned against the great soldier, and he was transported to the 

 lonely St. Helena, he must have felt that the last tie to France 

 had been severed when, in 1817, he felt forced to resign his chair 

 in the Academy of Sciences. 



Napoleon's battle of the Pyramids and conquest of Egypt 

 added little to his fame ; but his soldiers, in throwing up intrench- 

 ments near Rosetta, dug up a long-buried stone, in time to be es- 

 teemed more valuable than a dozen victorious battles. This stone, 

 which took its name from the place of its discovery, became 

 known as the Rosetta Stone. It was found to be of black basalt ; 

 about three feet seven inches in length and two feet six inches in 

 width, and covered with strange-looking inscriptions. The stone 

 finally found its way to the British Museum, where it still can be 

 seen, and where for many years scholars studied it in vain before 

 its incalculable archaeological value was discovered. The inscrip- 

 tion was found to be trilingual, the upper lines being in the hiero- 

 glyphic, the second in the demotic, and the third in the Greek 

 language. The Greek was soon translated and found to contain 

 a decree in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes by the Egyptian priest- 

 hood, and erected nearly two hundred years B. c. The inscription 

 being identical in the three languages, the Greek thus became the 

 key by which the hieroglyphics of tombs and obelisks, which had 

 so long baffled the ingenuity of acutest scholarship, were easily 

 deciphered. " The learned walls with hieroglyphics graced " be- 

 came an open book, whereon the world with wondering eyes 

 beheld ancient Egypt speak and live. 



In the interpretation of the Rosetta Stone, and through this 

 the interpretation of the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt, more 

 than to any one else the credit is due to Champollion. This emi- 

 nent Egyptologist was nine years old when the Rosetta Stone was 

 unearthed by his countrymen, but at an early age entered upon 

 his famous career. At seventeen he wrote a valuable paper upon 

 the Coptic language, at nineteen he was elected Professor of His- 

 tory in the Lyceum of Grenoble, and when but twenty-one pub- 

 lished his L'Egypte sous les Pharaons. In his studies upon the 

 Rosetta Stone Champollion followed the false belief, then preva- 

 lent, in the ideographic nature of the hieroglyphs. Dr. Thomas 

 Young, of London, who was employed in parallel studies of the 

 same subject, made the very important discovery of the phonetic 

 or alphabetic character of the hieroglyphs. The eager perception 



