built them up, he thinks; and if it is true, as we say, that we do not believe in them now, we at least show a strange hankering after the sins of our forefathers.

Well, it is hot standing here, with the sunshine full on our heads. Let us make our way to that mound covered with fallen palm fronds; and while the coffee is boiling over the spirit-lamp, I will tell you why I brought you here, and why I want you to keep a picture of this place for ever in your minds.

On this plain, covered now with grass and durah stubble, on the site of the squalid village we passed through, on the spot where those palm-trees are growing, once stood the great city of Memphis, the capital of Lower Egypt - the city that pleased Herodotus more than anything he had ever seen in his life-the wonder of the world. That statue, lying on its back in the ditch, is almost all we have left of it. Once it stood one among a long line of statues before the magnificent temple of Phthah or Pthah, which occupied this palm-shaded, fertile field, on which we are standing.

It would be very difficult indeed, from that one fallen statue, to call up a picture of the wonder city in its prime, and I do not want you to do so to-day. The scene I am going to ask you to look at is, perhaps, not so very different from what now is. Beginnings and endings-morning and evening twilight-they are not like each other, but they are less unlike, than each is to the splendour of midday.

The great interest of this place, I think, is, that here, with the foundation of Memphis by Menes, first king of Egypt, profane history may be said to begin. On this spot was acted the first event of which we can

write and say, with some certainty, so many ages ago it happened. A man called Menes came and built a town here. From the darkness of the forgotten past to the darkness of the unacted future, a great chain, link twisted into link, stretches. Here we see the first link, dimly indeed, but let us be thankful for such vision of it as we can get.

Six thousand years ago, then, there was a king over Egypt called Menes.

He was the son of some one whose name we do not know, and he was born in a place called This, of whose locality we are uncertain. It is supposed to have been situated in Upper Egypt, near Abydos; but we do not know what it was like, for there are no monuments or records of it remaining. One thing, however, we do know. It did not entirely satisfy King Menes. It had pleased his father and his grandfather well enough, I dare say, but Menes had the thought of a greater city in his head.

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Cannot you fancy him at This, in Upper Egypt, when he was a young man, saying to other young men, 'Things cannot go on much longer in this dull, old-fashioned way! We must have a change!" When he got the power into his own hand, he made a change. A very great change it must have seemed to the people who lived then! He turned the course of the Nile, which tradition says flowed over these fields once, drained the country, and founded here his new town.

He probably introduced new manners and new ways into his new town, for it is recorded that many hundred years afterwards, Tnephachthus, the father of Bocchoris the Wise, put up a tablet in the temple of Amun at Thebes, which pronounced a curse against Menes for

having induced the Egyptians to change their hitherto simple mode of life.

I think it is very curious that the first story with which we begin our history should be the story of a change. We cannot get at the true beginning, only at the rise of a new order of things, which springs up from an old dead order. The golden age always flies back from us; the first king comes before us with a curse on his head for having ended it. Now, remember, I do not say that King Menes put an end to the golden age, only that Bocchoris's father (a querulous, faultfinding old gentleman, perhaps) said that he did.

We shall never, I am afraid, know now what those simple manners were which Menes changed; but when we think how all the other introducers of new ways have been treated in the world's history, we may hope that perhaps Tnephachthus's curse was not merited, and, at all events, as it was not pronounced for many hundred years after his death, it could not have done King Menes any harm.

We know that he had a very long reign—a reign of sixty-two years; that he began the temple of Phthah at Memphis; and, by some historians, he is said to have made conquests beyond the frontiers of Egypt. The manner of his death was curious, and sets us wondering how it could have happened. He was killed, we are told, by a hippopotamus. What was he and what was the hippopotamus doing? How did they come together? I think, after a reign of sixty-two years, and after all his drainings, and buildings, and conquests, he must have been too old a man to go hippopotami-hunting or bathing in the river for pleasure. Surely his sons or his servants might have

taken better care of the poor old king, who had done so much, than to let him come to such a sad ending.

So it was, however, and it is at least something to remember him by. When you next look at the hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens, you will think that it may have been his thousand of times great grandfather who put an end to the reign of the first known Egyptian king.

Menes had two sons- Athothis and Nekherophis.

They are supposed both to have reigned jointly with their father during the latter part of his reignAthothis at old This in the upper country, and Nekherophis in the new city of Memphis, in the lower country.

Nekherophis died first, and for two years after his death Athothis united the whole of Egypt under his rule once more; then he died, and the upper and the lower country fell again to different rulers. Egypt, after the death of Athothis, does not appear to have been united under one sovereign. It is now supposed, by those who know most about the matter, that there were sometimes several contemporaneous kings of different dynasties or families reigning at the same time in Egypt.

The genealogies of the kings found on the monuments, in the ancient Papyri, and on the tables of succession left by ancient writers, make us acquainted with the names of a great number of Egyptian kings. When it was supposed that they all reigned one after the other, and when the number of years in their reigns, of which the Egyptian historian Manetho informs us, came to be added together, people were astonished at the immense length of time the Egyptian

monarchy appeared to have lasted. It seemed as if it were older than the world itself.

This puzzle has been partly cleared up. A careful study of the monuments and of the old papyrus books, has enabled modern historians to discover that these kings did not all follow one another, but that some of the different dynasties reigned contemporaneously in different parts of Egypt.

The dynasties are still numbered as Manetho numbered them, and called first, second, and third; but they did not come in regular succession as the numbering would lead you to suppose: and there is still so much uncertainty about the way in which they came, that there is a difference of a thousand years in the estimate which different authorities on Egyptian history make of the length of time between Menes and the first king of the eighteenth dynasty. I am sorry for the puzzle, but I cannot help it. I shall bring as few difficulties before you as possible, and, for the present, all I ask you to remember is, that Nekherophis, supposed to be the second son of Menes, was the head of what Manetho called the third, or Memphite dynasty, which governed Lower Egypt, while the descendants of Athothis, or first Thinite dynasty, were ruling at This, in Upper Egypt.

There is very little known about either of these two sons of Menes,-indeed, it is not quite certain that. Nekherophis was the son of Menes at all.

Athothis is said, by ancient writers, to have been a very learned man, to have written books on anatomy, and to have been a great patron of literature. This last fact shows that the Egyptians must have begun to study and to write books at a very early period. He