. And who shall say that the original Cadmus was
not our Pilularius? Certainly he left a record of the life he led, and
the journeys he took, long before the first emigration from the
flood-fertilized lands around Thebes-on-Nile carried civilization into
northern lands.

It may have been from this trick of his of writing on the sand that they
took his image for the signet; or perhaps it was only that the broad
under-surface of the stone or smalt of which they made the Scarabaeus was
too tempting to be left vacant, and the portable shape and size of the
stone gave it the preference over the images of crocodile or cat. Be
that as it may, it became the form universal for signets, and bore the
monogram or polygram of kings unnumbered and of chiefs unknown, so that
the fictle Scarabaeus doubtless carries to-day more strange messages for
us than did the great original to his first observers. Being as ignorant
of what hieroglyphs tell as the man who died when Champollion was born,
I do not venture a conjecture on the significance or value of the
"cartouches" inscribed on the plane surface of the Scarabaeus. There can
be no doubt that they were tokens of rank, and mainly bore direct
reference to the history or condition of the wearer, with occasional
mystic sentences, perhaps serving at once as signet and amulet.

My purpose, however, is to treat only of certain artistic relations, and
to me, therefore, the Egyptian Scarabaeus is only of value as it leads
to, and is connected with, the Etruscan. The former is utterly
unartistic,--a rude, but tolerably accurate imitation of the _Scarabaeus
pilularius_, the specific character being sufficiently developed,--the
whole value of the work, both in its figure and the incisions under it,
being evidently in its significance, and all conditions required of it
being sufficiently answered by intelligibility. This is, indeed,
characteristic of all Egyptian so-called art. It is not art at all, it
is only writing; and the transfer of the Scarabaeus from Egypt to Etruria
only forms another evidence of the inevitable antithesis existing
between art and record. The identical types which on the Nile told the
same story age after age, unchanging in their form as in their meaning,
once in the hands of the Etruscan, entered on a course of refinement and
artistic development into objects of beauty; but in this they entirely
lost sight of their original meaning. This is strikingly the case with
the Sc