818 THOMAS YOUNG. 
tians had two or three different sorts of writing, and that 
in one of these, at least, symbolic characters, or the rep- 
resentatives of ideas, played a principal part. Horapollon 
has even preserved to us the signification of a certain 
number of these characters. Thus we know that the 
hawk designated the soul; the tbis, the heart ; the dove 
(which might seem strange), a violent man ; the flute, 
an alien ; the number six, pleasure ; a frog, an imprudent 
man ; the ant, wisdom ; a running knot, love, &c. 
The signs thus preserved by Horapollon form only a 
very small part of the eight or nine hundred characters 
which have been found in the ancient inscriptions. The 
moderns, Kircher among others, have endeavoured to 
enlarge the number. Their efforts have not given any 
useful result, unless it be so to show to what errors even 
the best instructed men expose themselves when, in the 
search after facts, they abandon themselves without re- 
straint to imagination. In the want of data, the inter- 
pretation of the Egyptian writings appeared for a long 
time, to all sound minds, a problem completely incapable 
of solution; when in 1799, M. Boussard, an engineer 
officer, discovered in the excavations which he was making 
near Rosetta, a large stone covered with inscriptions in 
three kinds of characters quite distinct. 
One of the series of characters was Greek. This, in 
spite of some mutilations, made clearly known that the au- 
thors of the monument had ordained that the same inscrip- 
tion should be traced in three different sorts of characters, 
viz: in the sacred characters or Egyptian hieroglyphics, 
in the local or vulgar characters, and in Greek. Thus, 
by an unexpected good fortune, the philologists found 
themselves in possession of a Greek text, having also 
before them its translation into the Egyptian language, 
