philosophy; and we might, with much profit, pursue the examination of
our subject amongst the records of that highly civilized amongst the
ancient nations.

Many authors have attempted to show that there is a wonderful
resemblance between the Egyptians and the Hindoos, the sculptures on the
monuments of the former are most wonderfully like those of India, and
the features, dress, and arms are all as like as may be.

Both nations had the various arts of weaving, dyeing, embroidering,
working in metals, and the manufacture of glass, and practised them with
but little difference in their methods. The fine muslins of India find
their counterparts as "woven wind" in the transparent tissues figured on
the Egyptian temples. The style of building, the sciences of astronomy,
music, and medicine were assiduously cultivated by both nations, and
there was direct intercourse between them, perhaps even before
historical time begins.

Rameses the Great (III.), called also Sesostris, fitted out not only war
ships but merchant vessels for the purpose of trading with India, in
B.C. 1235, and Wilkinson in his book on the Ancient Egyptians, tells us
that in 2000 B.C. there were no less than 400 ships trading to the
Persian Gulf. There is, after all, nothing surprising in this when we
remember the fact, which is, however, not generally known, I am afraid,
that under the reign of Pharoah Necho, a fleet of his ships safely
circumnavigated Africa, from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, this
being in advance of the celebrated voyage of Diaz and Vasco da Gama by
no less than 2100 years.

No less than seven centuries before Thales went to study in Egypt,
astronomical calculations were inscribed on the monuments at Thebes, so
that we can see how modern by comparison the Greek philosophy appears.

In a note Wilkinson says that "The science of Medicine was one of the
earliest cultivated in Egypt. Athothes, the successor of Menes of the
first dynasty, is said to have written on the subject, and five papyri
on the subject have survived.

"They are of the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties.

"One known as the Papyrus Ebers, from its discoverer, is attributed to
the age of Kherpheres or Bikheres.

"The second, that of Berlin, found in the reign of Usaphais of the first
dynasty, was completed by Senet or Sethenes of the second line.

"The third, that of the British Museum, contains a receipt said to have
been mysteriously disco