that great Egyptologer in error, all who have followed him, including M. Lepsius, would doubtless have been struck, as I have been, with the difficulties and contradictions which appertain to the received division of the Egyptian seasons."

The bearings of this discovery upon Egyptian chronology, we cannot at once determine. M. Brugsch does not indicate these in his Memoir, but modestly lays his discovery at the feet of Egyptologists. We learn, however, that in private conversation this gentleman inclines to a much briefer chronology of ancient Egypt than that of Lepsius and Bunsen. This he may develop in his forthcoming work on the geography of Egypt. M. Lepsius cannot well overlook the challenge of his great rival; and, in due time, this discovery must work a revolution in Egyptian chronology. Egyptology, like Geology, must pass through successive phases before it is settled upon the basis of accepted and irrefragable science. Let theologians not be disturbed by "chimeras dire." Let them remember the Zodiac of Dendera. In due time light will be brought forth from Egyptian darkness, and truth will be established in her perpetual harmonies. The Bible can afford to wait until Science shall have matured her opinions. There never can be a real conflict between them.

It is a source of regret that America has contributed so little to Egyptology. May we not hope that, in connection with the Cooper Institute in New York, which is to contain the fine collection of Egyptian Antiquities made by Dr. Abbott, some Birch, or Brugsch, or Poole will arise, to wipe off the disgrace which such charlatans as Nott and Gliddon are bringing upon American science?

The investigations of M. Brugsch touching the Egyptian calendar, are followed, in his brochure, by a Memoir upon certain planetary observations recorded in demotic writing upon four Egyptian tablets. These tablets are included in the valuable collection of Egyptian antiquities made by Rev. Henry Stobart, an English clergyman, in his travels in Upper Egypt, in the years 1853 and 1854. A fac simile of the inscriptions is given in the plates that accompany the Memoir. The tablets are of wood, measuring each four inches by two and

a half, and are covered upon two sides with quintuple columns of demotic characters. These prove to be a series of observations upon the places of five planets in the signs of the zodiac. By the reading of these tablets in comparison with the zodiac and the rectangular planisphere of Dendera, M. Brugsch corrects Lepsius as to the order of the five planets in the astronomy of the ancient Egyptians, and also in the hieroglyphic reading of the planets themselves. The fol lowing table exhibits these differences.

Thus widely do these eminent Egyptologers differ as to the basis of the chronology of Egypt. The matter cannot end here. Not even Lepsius can afford to ignore Brugsch, as Bunsen and others affect to despise Mr. Poole. M. Brugsch does not hesitate to charge a grave error of interpretation upon the author of the Chronologie der Egypter, which must seriously affect his whole chronological system. In proof of this, he adduces the evidence of these newly-found tablets, and of numerous other astronomical inscriptions. Whatever may be the issue of this diversity between the two leading Egyptologers of Berlin, certain it is that the chronology of Egypt is not yet adjusted to a scale so fixed that it is worth while to try to conform to it the elements of Biblical chronology scattered through the Old Testament.

The order which M. Brugsch assigns to the planets, in Egyptian astronomy, corresponds with the common astronomical faith of the nations of antiquity. In Mr. Stobart's four tablets, these five planets follow each other twenty-eight times, in the same order. M. Brugsch prepared a careful translation of these tablets, to be submitted to the leading astronomers of Europe. He appends

a letter from the eminent astronomer Biot, of Paris, from which we translate the following:

"I have great pleasure in informing you that the astronomical restoration of the demotic tablets has been made at London, by Mr. Ellis, an assistant of Mr. Airy, of the Greenwich Observatory; and that this accords remarkably with your conjectures. Mr. Airy himself informs me of this, in at letter which I received from him yesterday, and I hasten to transmit to you this good news. Mr. Ellis finds that these are, without doubt, records of the places of the planets; those which he has restored, extend from the year 105 to the year 114 of our era. This last point corresponds with the close of the reign of Trajan in Egypt - as you had conjectured. The Egyptian year, according to which these places are registered, is found to have commenced on the 29th of August by the Julian calendar, which shows that the dates are conformed to the fixed Alexandrine year, which was in use in Egypt from the fifth year of Augustus.

"The most useful result of your discovery will be, I think, the ascertaining beyond a doubt the names that the Egyptians gave to the five planets, the characters with which they wrote these, and perhaps the special symbols, if such there were, by which they designated them; these last may possibly be recovered from the Pharaonic monuments. That these notations of planetary places were made after actual observations, seems to me not at all probable. In fact, for this there must have been, in the time of Trajan, at Thebes or Memphis, a grand observatory, manned by accomplished observers, well appointed with instruments, and making constant note of the movements of the planets; - all things of which there is no trace in Egypt at that epoch, except at Alexandria, and there only to a limited extent. I therefore incline to regard these tablets as having been the note-book (calepin) or the year-book of a Roman or Greek astrologer living in Egypt, who thus inscribed, for his own use, the places of the planets calculated in advance according to the Greek astronomy; merely transforming the dates of the vague year, into corresponding dates of the fixed year."

VOL. XIV. No. 55.

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Such is M. Biot's conjecture as to these curious tablets. However viewed, they must furnish additional data for the determination of the chronology of Egypt, by the help of her astronomical records.

ARTICLE VIII.

NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS.

LENTEN SERMONS.'

FIRST of all, as we peruse these discourses, our attention is arrested by the boldness, and even baldness, of their style. These qualities would be the less noticeable, if the discourses had emanated from a less aristocratic circle. The Bishop of Oxford, in his sermon on Half-Repentance, exclaims: "How many a cry for mercy, in that hour of agony, [the hour of death-bed repentance, so-called] is only the howl of the unrenewed nature under the whip, not the turning of the heart to God!" p. 14. Half-repentance "stands close beside men, watching for their soul, like some gibbering devil transformed for their destruction into an angel of light." p. 15. The tenth sermon in the volume is entitled "Our Lord's Agony," and is written by Thomas Thelusson Carter, M. A., Rector of Clewer, Berks. Here we read such passages as these: "We have seen how, in the depth of the agony of God, sorrow finds its consolation." p. 19. "Such an one, then, can feel the blessed consolation which flows from the agony of God, and can hear God in His sorrows speaking with the voice of a man to man's heart.” p. 14. "It is impossible not to deny one's self, while one considers the sufferings of God." p. 23; see also p. 25. "God has not only taken into Himself the nature of man, He has taken into Himself the consciousness of the wounds which He received in that nature. The sympathy of God for human suffering is the result of the experience obtained through the inward trials of His own sensitive nature." p. 13. It is certainly not usual to speak of God's obtaining experience from the trials of God's sensitive nature, or of God's consciousness of the wounds which He received on the cross. The

1 Lenten Sermons. Preached on the evening of each Wednesday and Friday, during the season of Lent, in the Church of St. Mary-the- Virgin, Oxford. With a Preface by Samuel, Lord Bishop of Oxford. Oxford, and 377 Strand, London: John Henry and James Parker. 1857.

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Bishop of Oxford speaks of "the mire wallowings of sense." Dr. Trench characterizes all the impenitent as " fighters against God," and some of them as slaking "the thirst of their spirits at the muddiest pools of sensual joy." Rolling in the mire, they are well pleased with that sorceress sin, which, like Circe, has transformed them into swine." p. 11. Dr. Pusey's sermon on "Repentance from Love to God, Life-long," is perhaps the best in this volume. He does not hesitate to say: "One deadly sin is an infinite evil." p. 14. Any one such sin is enough to plunge the soul in hell." p. 19. He speaks of "the sharp, fiery fangs of the undying worm," and says: 66 Unrepented sin, with the sinner, is the fuel of hell-fire." "Shrink not from thinking of hell. No one, probably, who thought much of it ever fell into it. A poor woman who had its fires day and night before her eyes, and despaired of her salvation, and lost for the time power to pray, was asked whether she would still commit a sin. No one could commit sin,' was the answer, with the sight of that place before her, as I have now.' Think, morning by morning, of the four last things, Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell, and that thou art one day nearer to thine everlasting abode." p. 24. Such plain illustrations as this have not been common in the writings of a Regius Professor at Oxford.

While there are passages of exquisite beauty in this volume, and many indications of the liberal culture, the refined taste, the classical spirit, which characterize its authors, we notice not a few singular inaccuracies of style. Even the Bishop of London, who is the writer of the second sermon, says that the doctrine of "an evil spirit, a personal evil being," "is the teaching not only of the narrative now before us [that of our Lord's temptation], but of the whole Bible, from the first of Genesis to the twenty-second of Revelations." p. 8. Mr. Eyre, in the fourth sermon, speaks of "the wage of sins which" Christ bore. p. 9. In the tenth sermon, by Mr. Carter, we read: "Loss or death are scarcely understood." p. 17.

The thoroughness, rigidness, and severity with which all forms of sin are treated in this volume, are worthy of especial commendation. "Sin as sin" is held up for the abhorrence of the Christian. Dr. Hook's Sermon on Self-Deceit, the third in the volume, is admirably fitted to encourage a selfscrutinizing spirit, and to detect the most ingenious methods of unconscious hypocrisy. Dr. Maberly's Sermon on Judas Iscariot is a truly pungent appeal to the clergy, some of whom are successors of the fallen apostle. Dr. Pusey's Sermon is sharp in its rebuke of iniquity, and well fitted to arouse the conscience. The Sermon of Dr. Goulburn, Head Master of Rugby School, on "Final Impenitence," is explicit in its affirmation of the doctrines, that there is a personal devil, that eternal punishment is threatened against all sin, and is merited by even the sins of omission. In this discourse, as indeed in every other in the volume, are some remarks which we disapprove. Thus he says of Dives: "Ungodly he might be, and was; selfish he might be, and was; but he does not appear to have been, in any true sense of the term, a wicked man." p. 11. Dr. Goulburn simply means