1886.] on Thomas Young. 577 



in each temple of the first and second and third gods." . All three in- 

 scriptions were more or less mutilated and efiaced when the stone was 

 discovered. Porson and Heyne had, however, succeeded in almost 

 completely restoring the Greek one. 



It had been a custom with Young to pay an annual visit to 

 "Worthing, and to pursue there for a portion of the year his practice 

 as a physician. The Society of Antiquaries had caused copies of 

 the three inscriptions of the Eosetta stone to be made and published, 

 and in the summer of 1814, Young took all of them to Worthing, 

 where he subjected them to a severe comparative examination. Baron 

 Sylvestre de Sacy, an eminent orientalist, had discovered in the 

 native Egyptian, certain groups of characters answering to proper 

 names, while Akerblad, a profound Coptic scholar, had not only 

 added to the number, but attempted to establish an alphabet answer- 

 ing to the native Egyptian inscription. Young took up the re- 

 searches of these distinguished men as far as they could be relied on. 

 Assuming all three inscriptions to express the same decree, one of 

 them being in a language known to scholars, it was inferred by 

 Young that a strict comparison of line with line, word with word, and 

 character with character, would lead him by the sure method of 

 science from the known to the unknown. He rapidly passed his pre- 

 decessors. De Sacy had determined three proper names in the 

 Egyptian ; Akerblad nine others, and five or six Coptic words ; while 

 Young soon after detected the rudiments of fifty or sixty Coptic 

 words, which, however, formed but a very small fraction of the whole 

 inscription. And here an unexpected stumbling-block was en- 

 countered. The effort of Akerblad to reduce the whole Enchorial 

 inscription to Coptic had failed,* and it soon became evident to 

 Young that every such attempt must of necessity fail. His conviction 

 and its grounds are first mentioned in a letter to Mr. Gurney, written 

 in August 1814. "I doubt," he writes, " if it will be ever possible 

 to reduce much more of it to Coptic, especially as I have fully ascer- 

 tained that some of the characters are hieroglyphics y As bearing 

 upon the derivative origin of the Enchorial inscription, the discovery 

 here announced is of the highest importance. Young continues: 

 " I have, however, made out the sense of the whole sufficiently for 

 my purpose, and by means of variations from the Greek, I have been 

 able to effect a comparison with the hieroglyphics which it would have 

 been impossible to do satisfactorily without this intermediate step." 

 In a letter to the Archduke John of Austria, dated 2nd August, 1816, 

 Young announced that he had " now fully demonstrated the hiero- 

 glyphical origin " of the Enchorial inscription.f 



* " Notwithstanding this failure, his name," says Peacock, " should ever be 

 held in honour as one of the founders of our knowledge of Egyptian literature, 

 to the investigation of which he brought no small amount of patient labour and 

 philological learning." 



t "The same discovery," says the editor of the third volume of Young's 

 Works, " was announced by M. ChampoUion, as his own, in his memoir ' De 



2 P 2 



