aw that
some license was pernicious.

"If we pass to science, we shall find no reason for supposing that the
advances of modern times were anticipated by the mysterious wisdom of
the Egyptians. Something they must have known of astronomy to practise
astrology, to divide the ecliptic, and to effect the exact orientation
of the Pyramids. Some knowledge of chemistry is implied in their
manufacture of porcelain; some knowledge of physiology, pathology,
pharmaceutics and surgery, in their division of the medical art;
something of geometry in their measurement of land; and something of
mechanics in their enormous buildings and monuments. But their great
engines were multitudes of laborers, aided by such natural expedients as
the lever, the roller, and the inclined plane, which can scarcely be
called machines. In other sciences there is evidence of long and careful
observation, but nothing to prove an acquaintance with the _laws_ of
nature. Progress in the medical art was precluded by the necessity of
adhering to the precepts of the sacred books. Science was monopolized by
the priests; and it is said that by them the King was regularly sworn to
retain the old and unintercalated year. The want of decimal notation,
and the consequent clumsiness of the system of numeration, would go far
to preclude the improvement of arithmetic, or any science into which
calculation entered.

"Literature the Egyptians appear to have had none, except of the
monumental or sacred kind, including under the latter head the sacred
books of science. But the art of writing was practised by them, or at
least by the learned part of them, more extensively than by any
contemporary nation. Mr. Kenrick gives us a full history of the
interpretation of hieroglyphics, the key to which was first given by the
parallel inscriptions in hieroglyphic and Greek found on the famous
Rosetta stone, and metes to Young and Champollion their due shares in
that discovery, of which each uncandidly claimed the whole. The
hieroglyphics are now known to be of three kinds, all of which are
generally mingled in the same inscription--the pictorial, the
symbolical, and the phonetic. The pictorial hieroglyphic is the simple
picture of the thing signified. Symbolical hieroglyphics are, among
others, a crescent for a month, the maternal vulture for _maternity_,
the filial vulpanser for _son_, the bee for _a people obedient to their
king_, the bull for _strength_, the ostrich feather wi