Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/102

92 celebrated memoir of 1806. It was Bonaparte who proposed to award a gold medal to Volta, after reading his memoir on galvanism; and later induced Volta, by emoluments and titles, to surrender his Italian professorship for a residence in Paris. When the memorable expedition to Egypt set sail, Bonaparte took with him many savants and Academicians. After the wager of battle had turned against the great soldier, and he was transported to the lonely St. Helena, he must have felt that the last tie to France had been severed when, in 1817, he felt forced to resign his chair in the Academy of Sciences.

Napoleon's battle of the Pyramids and conquest of Egypt added little to his fame; but his soldiers, in throwing up intrenchments near Rosetta, dug up a long-buried stone, in time to be esteemed more valuable than a dozen victorious battles. This stone, which took its name from the place of its discovery, became known as the Rosetta Stone. It was found to be of black basalt; about three feet seven inches in length and two feet six inches in width, and covered with strange-looking inscriptions. The stone finally found its way to the British Museum, where it still can be seen, and where for many years scholars studied it in vain before its incalculable archæological value was discovered. The inscription was found to be trilingual, the upper lines being in the hieroglyphic, the second in the demotic, and the third in the Greek language. The Greek was soon translated and found to contain a decree in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes by the Egyptian priesthood, and erected nearly two hundred years b. c. The inscription being identical in the three languages, the Greek thus became the key by which the hieroglyphics of tombs and obelisks, which had so long baffled the ingenuity of acutest scholarship, were easily deciphered. "The learned walls with hieroglyphics graced" became an open book, whereon the world with wondering eyes beheld ancient Egypt speak and live.

In the interpretation of the Rosetta Stone, and through this the interpretation of the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt, more than to any one else the credit is due to Champollion. This eminent Egyptologist was nine years old when the Rosetta Stone was unearthed by his countrymen, but at an early age entered upon his famous career. At seventeen he wrote a valuable paper upon the Coptic language, at nineteen he was elected Professor of History in the Lyceum of Grenoble, and when but twenty-one published his L'Egypte sous les Pharaons. In his studies upon the Rosetta Stone Champollion followed the false belief, then prevalent, in the ideographic nature of the hieroglyphs. Dr. Thomas Young, of London, who was employed in parallel studies of the same subject, made the very important discovery of the phonetic or alphabetic character of the hieroglyphs. The eager perception