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Bissing’s criticisms are always well justified: they testify to a mature taste or a sure tact, and there are very few with which experts would not willingly agree. Here and there, however, I must make some reservations, for example, with regard to the Chephrên of Gizeh. After discussing at length Borchardt’s reasons for attributing it to a Saïte school, and refuting them, Bissing declares that it is perhaps a late copy of a work contemporary with the Pharaoh. I recently had occasion to study it closely in order to determine the position in the Museum best suited to it, and to decide the height of the plinth on which it should be placed. I went over Borchardt’s arguments and Bissing’s hypotheses one after the other and came to the conclusion that the date assigned by Mariette at the moment of its discovery is the only admissible one. The archæological details belong to the Memphian age, and the peculiarities of style which Bissing points out, and which actually exist, are not sufficiently strongly marked to justify its attribution to a later epoch. I only see in them the divergences which, in every age, mark works coming from different and perhaps rival studios. The artists who cut the doubles in diorite destined for the pyramid of the Pharaoh, did not certainly have the same masters as those to whom we owe the Chephrên in alabaster and the royal statuettes of Mitrahineh: the difference of origin sufficiently explains why they do not resemble each other. I fear that in criticizing certain sculptures Borchardt and others were governed in spite of themselves by the ideas that long prevailed on the uniformity and monotony of Egyptian art. It seemed to them that at one and the same period the composition and inspiration must always remain identical, and wherever they did not harmonize, the fact was attributed solely to an interval in time. But we must accustom ourselves to think that things did not go differently with the Egyptians than with the moderns. In a city like Memphis there was more than one studio, and they all possessed their traditions, their affectations, their style, which distinguished them from each other, and which are found in their work like a trade-mark. Some errors of classification will be avoided in the future if we can be persuaded to recognize that many of the peculiarities that we begin to note on statues and bas-reliefs may be the mannerisms of the school to which they belong, and are not always indications of relative age.