388 THE BORDERLAND OF SCIENCE. 



that which was in Greek only ; and I could scarcely 

 believe that I was awake and in my sober senses, 

 when I observed among the names of the witnesses 

 Antimachus Antigenis (sic); and a few lines farther 

 back, Portis Apollonii ; although the last word could 

 not have been very easily deciphered without the 

 assistance of the conjecture, which immediately oc- 

 cured to me, that this manuscript might perhaps be a 

 translation of the enchorial manuscript of Casati. I 

 found that its beginning was, " A copy of an Egyptian 

 writing ;" and I proceeded to ascertain that there were 

 the same number of names intervening between the 

 Greek and the Egyptian signatures that I had identi- 

 fied, and that the same number followed the last of 

 them. The whole number of witnesses was sixteen in 

 each.' ... I could not therefore but conclude,' 

 proceeds Dr. Young, after dwelling on other points 

 equally demonstrative of the identity of the Greek and 

 enchorial inscriptions, ' that a most extraordinary 

 chance had brought into my possession a document 

 which was not very likely, in the first place, ever to 

 have existed, still less to have been preserved unin- 

 jured, -for my information, through a period of near 

 two thousand years ; but that this very extraordinary 

 translation should have been brought safely to Europe, 

 to England, and to me, at the very moment when it 

 was most of all desirable to me to possess it, as the 

 illustration of an original which I was then studying, 

 but without any other reasonable hope of compre- 

 hending it; this combination would, in . other times, 



