40 On the Division of Labour as 



ciently intelligible form : that is, in the Index to the volume 

 of Hieroglyphics, *' collected by the Egyptian Society," and 

 now continued by the Royal Society of Literature. The 

 brackets, which join the words of this index, point out at once 

 the degree of agreement between the characters supposed to 

 be translated ; and by a reference to the plates there indicated, 

 the reader may judge for himself to what extent he may place 

 confidence in each interpretation. Some characters occur, for 

 instance, about a hundred times, some fifty, some ten ; some 

 two only : yet all of these may be fully authenticated by the 

 recurrence, if the identity of the forms is sufficiently apparent; 

 and sometimes the context may be such as to leave no doubt 

 whatever, where the character occurs but once. When Mr. 

 ChampoUion shall have leisure to do that, on the part of his 

 system, which Dr. Young's *' distracted attention" has still left 

 him time to perform for his interpretations, we shall be better 

 able to judge with confidence of the real progress that the 

 investigation has made in his hands. 



In the mean time I shall proceed to consider, in the second 

 place, the character and internal evidence of the System, 

 concerning which so much has been said. (Brit. Crit. p. 142) 

 and which, so far as it is a system, seems to me to contain 

 within itself its own contradiction, for a system of phonetic 

 HIEROGLYPHICS ucvcr could havc been generally employed 

 but by a nation of children. Take, for example, the word 

 APPLE, expressed by an apple, two pears, a lion, and an egg, 

 all denoting an apple only ! Surely there must have been 

 some common sense among the Egyptians, though they seem 

 to have wanted no grammarians, and are reported to have 

 had neither orators nor poets ! And would common sense have 

 permitted them to add four superfluous characters, out of five, 

 in order to be mere echos of the sounds, denoting what is 

 already denoted by the first of the five ? 



The truth is, that there never was a language that was 

 written altogether phonetically. A very numerous class of 

 our own characters are not phonetic : our Roman and Arabic 

 numerals, our stops, our parentheses, our marks of quotation, 

 and many other extraalphabetic signs ; and even our literal 

 characters are sometimes not simply phonetic : the sounds of 



