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340 race, the Alforas: our knowledge of their speech is not sufficient for us to determine with confidence their linguistic position.

The rank in the scale of languages generally assigned to the ancient Egyptian (with its successor, the modern Coptic), its often alleged connection with the Semitic, and the antiquity and importance of the culture to which it served as instrument, would have justified us in treating it next after the Indo-European and Semitic; but it seemed more convenient to traverse the whole joint continent of Europe and Asia, before crossing into Africa. The chronology of Egyptian history is still a subject of not a little controversy; but it cannot be reasonably doubted that the very earliest written monuments of human thought are found in the valley of the Nile, as well as the most ancient and most gigantic works of human art. There was wisdom in Egypt, accumulated and handed down through a long succession of generations, for Moses, the founder of the Hebrew state, to become learned in; and Herodotus, the "father of history," as we are accustomed to style him, found Egypt, when he visited it, already entered upon its period of dotage and decay. It was a strange country: one narrow line of brilliant green, (but spreading fan-like at its northern extremity), traced by the periodical overflow of a single branchless and sourceless river through the great desert which sweeps from the Atlantic coast to the very border of India; so populous and so fertile as to furnish a surplusage of labour, for the execution of architectural works of a solidity and grandeur elsewhere unknown, and which the absolute dryness of the climate has permitted to come down to us in unequalled preservation. On these monuments, within and without, the record-loving Egyptians depicted and described the events of their national and personal history, the course and occupations of their daily lives, their offerings, prayers, and praises, the scenes of their public worship and of the administration of their state, their expeditions and conquests. Their language has thus stood for ages plainly written before the eyes of the world, inviting readers; but the key to the characters in which it was inscribed, the sacred hieroglyphics, had been lost almost