a modern museum suspects the meaning of the hieroglyphs
on the case of a mummy.

It was not that the rudiments of this story are so
very hard to decipher--though in truth they are hard
enough--but rather that the men who made the attempt
had all along viewed the subject through an atmosphere
of preconception, which gave a distorted
image. Before this image could be corrected it was
necessary that a man should appear who could see
without prejudice, and apply sound common-sense to
what he saw. And such a man did appear towards the
close of the century, in the person of William Smith, the
English surveyor. He was a self-taught man, and perhaps
the more independent for that, and he had the
gift, besides his sharp eyes and receptive mind, of a
most tenacious memory. By exercising these faculties,
rare as they are homely, he led the way to a
science which was destined, in its later developments,
to shake the structure of established thought to its
foundations.

Little enough did William Smith suspect, however,
that any such dire consequences were to come of his act
when he first began noticing the fossil shells that here
and there are to be found in the stratified rocks and
soils of the regions over which his surveyor's duties led
him. Nor, indeed, was there anything of such apparent
revolutionary character in the facts which he
unearthed; yet in their implications these facts were