hone wire, one can imagine a
striking analogy between the modus operandi of nervous processes and
of the telephone system. The utility of new connections at the central
office, the uselessness of the mechanism when the connections cannot
be made, the "wires in use" that retard your message, perhaps even the
crossing of wires, bringing you a jangle of sounds far different from
what you desire--all these and a multiplicity of other things that will
suggest themselves to every user of the telephone may be imagined as
being almost ludicrously paralleled in the operations of the nervous
mechanism. And that parallel, startling as it may seem, is not a mere
futile imagining. It is sustained and rendered plausible by a sound
substratum of knowledge of the anatomical conditions under which the
central nervous mechanism exists, and in default of which, as pathology
demonstrates with no less certitude, its functionings are futile to
produce the normal manifestations of higher intellection.

X. THE NEW SCIENCE OF ORIENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY

HOW THE "RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX" WAS READ

Conspicuously placed in the great hall of Egyptian antiquities in the
British Museum is a wonderful piece of sculpture known as the Rosetta
Stone. I doubt if any other piece in the entire exhibit attracts so much
attention from the casual visitor as this slab of black basalt on its
telescope-like pedestal. The hall itself, despite its profusion of
strangely sculptured treasures, is never crowded, but before this stone
you may almost always find some one standing, gazing with more or less
of discernment at the strange characters that are graven neatly across
its upturned, glass-protected face. A glance at this graven surface
suffices to show that three sets of inscriptions are recorded there.
The upper one, occupying about one-fourth of the surface, is a pictured
scroll, made up of chains of those strange outlines of serpents, hawks,
lions, and so on, which are recognized, even by the least initiated,
as hieroglyphics. The middle inscription, made up of lines, angles,
and half-pictures, one might surmise to be a sort of abbreviated
or short-hand hieroglyphic. The third or lower inscription is
Greek--obviously a thing of words. If the screeds above be also made of
words, only the elect have any way of proving the fact.

Fortunately, however, even the least scholarly observer is left in
no doubt as to the real import of the thing he sees, for an obliging