140 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



briefly at a past altogether unique in the annals of the world ; a past so remote 

 that when Caesar and his Commentaries were baptized in the harbor of Alexan- 

 dria, and Marc Antony lay dreaming in the arms of Cleopatra, it was even then 

 shrouded in the mists of immemorial antquity. 



It is a curious and instructive illustration of the vicissitudes of human affairs 

 that the destinies of Egypt should now be in the hands of nations which were un- 

 born when she had practically passed from the stage of active life; her work com- 

 pleted, her mission finished. Before a single stone was laid where now stand 

 London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, splendid cities covered Egyptian soil. When the 

 waters of the Thames and the Seine were vexed only by the rafts or canoes of 

 wandering barbarians, the waters of the Nile floated the barges of Egyptian kings 

 and washed the walls of palaces and temples larger and grander than Windsor and 

 Westminster, the Louvre and Notre Dame. When the ancestors of the English, 

 French, Germans and Austrians of to-day were the rudest savages, struggling for 

 precarious existence with beasts scarcely more wild and savage than themselves, 

 the inhabitants of Egypt were a highly organized society, with all the depart- 

 ments of the social system in full operation, with an elaborate government, an 

 extensive literature, and a religion from which later religions have drawn some of 

 their noblest ideas. When the roving prehistoric people of Europe were cave- 

 dwellers, because they knew nothing of huts, much less of houses, the prehistoric 

 people of Egypt built the pyramids, reared the shrines and colonnades of Luxor, 

 excavated and frescoed the rock tombs of Thebes, carved the mysterious Sphinx 

 and the colossal statues of Rameses. When in all Europe there was not a line of 

 written language, Egyptian monuments bore volumes of those strange hieroglyph" 

 ics which are now the admiration and the study of European scholars. When 

 throughout Europe men and women bowed down to sticks and stones, in a fetich 

 worship as gross and degrading as that of the negroes of Central Africa, an 

 Egyptian priest — on a papyrus supposed to date 3,000 years before the Christian 

 era — expressed a popular belief in one God, supreme and indivisible, in the im- 

 mortality of the soul, and in rewards and punishments beyond the grave. The 

 original of that ark of the covenant which Moses constructed, and which found 

 final lodgment in the Holy of Holies at Jerusalem, is still to be seen in an Egyptian 

 painting done before the great Hebrew leader and law-giver was rescued from 

 the cradle of bullrushes ; and the brazen serpent he raised for the salvation of his 

 followers in the wilderness has its counterpart among Egyptian figures designed 

 and executed before Abraham pitched his tent in the land of Canaan. Modern 

 civilization and culture make sufficiently generous acknowledgment of the vast 

 debt they owe to Greece and Rome ; but how seldom is it even hinted that our 

 civilization and culture owe anything of consequence to Egypt. Yet centuries 

 before Romulus raised his wall on the Palatine Hill, or the beginnings of Athens 

 clustered around the Acropolis, Egypt was the world's school and library. Art 

 and science flourished there when no sign of either was visible elsewhere. Solon 

 went there to learn legislation, Herodotus to learn history, Plato to learn philoso- 

 phy ; and no great teacher in any important branch of knowledge considered him- 



