580 Professor Tyndall [Jan. 22, 



heard or read, not one of these particulars had ever been established 

 and placed on record by any other person, dead or alive." 



No man was a better judge of intellectual labour than Dean Pea- 

 cock. The whole of Young's writings, preparatory and otherwise, 

 were before him when he wrote ; and he states emphatically, that it is 

 impossible to estimate either the vast extent to which Dr. Young had 

 carried his hieroglyphical investigations or the progress which he had 

 made in them, without an inspection of these manuscripts. In re- 

 ference to an article entitled "Egypt," written by Young in 1818, 

 and published in the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica ' for 1819, a writer in 

 the 'Edinburgh Eeview' for 1826 delivers the following weighty 

 opinion : " We do not hesitate to pronounce this article the greatest 

 effort of scholarship and ingenuity of which modern literature can 

 boast." Even to an outsider it offers proof of astonishing learning 

 and research. Still, Peacock assures us that this publication of 1819 

 could hardly be considered more than a popular and superficial sketch 

 of the vast mass of materials on which it was founded. 



Young was limited to what Peacock here calls "a popular and 

 superficial sketch," by the fact that the article in the ' Encyclopaedia 

 Britannica ' was written for ordinary readers rather than for critics or 

 learned men. In this article, however, we are allowed a glimpse of 

 Young's mode of collating and comparing the different inscriptions. 

 He looks at the Enchorial inscription, and notices certain recurrent 

 groups of characters; he looks at the Greek inscription, and finds 

 there words with the same, or approximately the same, periods of 

 recurrence. Thus, " a small group of characters occurring very often, 

 in almost every line, might be either some termination or some very 

 common particle ; it must therefore be reserved till it is found in 

 some decisive situation, after some other words have been identified, 

 and it will then easily be shown to mean and. The next remarkable 

 collection of characters is repeated twenty-nine or thirty times in the 

 Enchorial inscription ; and we find nothing that occurs so often in 

 the Greek except the word Mng. ... A fourth assemblage of cha- 

 racters is found fourteen times in the Enchorial inscription, agreeing 

 sufficiently well in frequency with the name of Ptolemy. ... By a 

 similar comparison, the name of Egypt is identified. . . . Having 

 thus," says Young, " obtained a sufficient number of common points 

 of subdivision, we next proceed to write the Greek text over the 

 Enchorial in such a manner that the j)assages ascertained may all 

 coincide as nearly as possible ; and it is obvious that the intermediate 

 parts of each inscription will then stand very near to the cor- 

 responding passages of the other. . . . By pursuing the comparison 

 of the inscriptions thus arranged, we ultimately discover the signifi- 

 cation of the greater part of the individual Enchorial words." 



Having thus compared the Greek text with the Enchorial, Young 

 next proceeded to compare the Enchorial with the hieroglyphical. 

 About half the lines of the latter were obliterated, and the rest were 



