scholar, by comparing the characters composing the words Ptolemy,
Alexander, and other names in the parallel inscriptions, discovered the
value of several of the symbols; and thus were opened the vast libraries
of Egyptian learning.

We have now the Ritual, or Book, of the Dead, a sort of guide to the soul
in its journey through the underworld; romances, and fairy tales, among
which is "Cinderella and the Glass Slipper"; autobiographies, letters,
fables, and epics; treatises on medicine, astronomy, and various other
scientific subjects; and books on history--in prose and verse--which fully
justify the declaration of the Egyptian priests to Solon: "You Greeks are
mere children, talkative and vain; you know nothing at all of the past."

ASTRONOMY, GEOGRAPHY AND ARITHMETIC.--The cloudless and brilliant skies of
Egypt invited the inhabitants of the Nile valley to the study of the
heavenly bodies. And another circumstance closely related to their very
existence, the inundation of the Nile, following the changing cycles of
the stars, could not but have incited them to the watching and predicting
of astronomical movements. Their observations led them to discover the
length, very nearly, of the sidereal year, which they made to consist of
365 days, every fourth year adding one day, making the number for that
year 366. They also divided the year into twelve months of thirty days
each, adding five days to complete the year. This was the calendar that
Julius Caesar introduced into the Roman Empire, and which, slightly
reformed by Pope Gregory XIII. in 1582, has been the system employed by
almost all the civilized world up to the present day.

The Greeks accounted for the early rise of the science of geometry among
the Egyptians by reference to the necessity they were under each year of
re-establishing the boundaries of their fields--the inundation