With his usual ardour in the cause of learning, Bonaparte several times a week appeared in the chemical laboratory, or witnessed the experiments performed by Berthollet and Monge.  Desirous of giving cohesion to the efforts of his savants, and of honouring not only the useful arts but abstruse research, he united these pioneers of science in a society termed the Institute of Egypt.  On August 23rd, 1798, it was installed with much ceremony in the palace of one of the Beys, Monge being president and Bonaparte vice-president.  The general also enrolled himself in the mathematical section of the institute.  Indeed, he sought by all possible means to aid the labours of the savants, whose dissertations were now heard in the large hall of the harem that formerly resounded only to the twanging of lutes, weary jests, and idle laughter.  The labours of the savants were not confined to Cairo and the Delta.  As soon as the victories of Desaix in Upper Egypt opened the middle reaches of the Nile to peaceful research, the treasures of Memphis were revealed to the astonished gaze of western learning.  Many of the more portable relics were transferred to Cairo, and thence to Rosetta or Alexandria, in order to grace the museums of Paris.  The savants proposed, but sea-power disposed, of these treasures.  They are now, with few exceptions, in the British Museum.

Apart from archaeology, much was done to extend the bounds of learning.  Astronomy gained much by the observations of General Caffarelli.  A series of measurements was begun for an exact survey of Egypt:  the geologists and engineers examined the course of the Nile, recorded the progress of alluvial deposits at its mouth or on its banks, and therefrom calculated the antiquity of divers parts of the Delta.  No part of the great conqueror’s career so aptly illustrates the truth of his noble words to the magistrates of the Ligurian Republic:  “The true conquests, the only conquests which cost no regrets, are those achieved over ignorance.”

Such, in brief outline, is the story of the renascence in Egypt.  The mother-land of science and learning, after a wellnigh barren interval of 1,100 years since the Arab conquest, was now developed and illumined by the application of the arts with which in the dim past she had enriched the life of barbarous Europe.  The repayment of this incalculable debt was due primarily to the enterprise of Bonaparte.  It is one of his many titles to fame and to the homage of posterity.  How poor by the side of this encyclopaedic genius are the gifts even of his most brilliant foes!  At that same time the Archduke Charles of Austria was vegetating in inglorious ease on his estates.  As for Beaulieu and Wuermser, they had subsided into their native obscurity.  Nelson, after his recent triumph, persuading himself that “Bonaparte had gone to the devil,” was bending before the whims of a professional beauty and the odious despotism of the worst Court in Europe.  While the admiral