ing shells of oysters, scallops, and other marine mollusks, with the skeletons of sea-urchins. The specific characters of these marine organic remains leave no doubt that they lived during the miocene, or middle tertiary, epoch. Marine beds of the same age occur at Ain Musa, between Cairo and Suez.

There can be no question, therefore, that, in the miocene epoch, the valley of the delta was, as Herodotus thought it must have been, a gulf of the sea. And, as no trace of marine deposits of this, or of a later age, has been discovered in Upper Egypt, it must be assumed that the apex of the delta coincides with the southern limit of the ancient gulf.

delta, can only be a measure of the time required to fill up the whole, if the annual sediment is deposited in a layer of even thickness over the entire area. But this is not what takes place. When the river first spread out from the southern end of the delta, it must have deposited the great mass of its solid contents near that end; and this upper portion of the delta must have been filled up when the lower portion was still covered with water. And, since the area to be covered grew wider the further north the process of filling was carried, it is obvious that the northern part of the delta must have taken much longer to fill than the southern. If we suppose that the alluvium about Memphis was deposited at the rate of one-twentieth Moreover, there is some curious eviof an inch per annum, and that there are dence in favor of the belief that, at this fifty feet of it, ten thousand years may be period, however remote as measured by the minimum age of that particular part our standards of time, the Nile flowed of the delta; but the age of the alluvium down from central Africa as it flows now, of the delta as a whole must be very con- but probably in much larger volume. siderably greater. And indeed there are Every visitor to Cairo makes a pilgrimage some indications that the shore line of to the "petrified forest," which is to be the nascent delta remained, for a long seen in the desert a few miles to the time, in the parallel of Athribis, five-and- north-east of that city. And indeed it is twenty miles north of Cairo, where the re-a spectacle worth seeing. Thousands of mains of a line of ancient sand dunes is trunks of silicified trees, some of them said to attest the fact. Hence, all at twenty or thirty feet long, and a foot or tempts to arrive at any definite estimate two in diameter, lie scattered about and of the number of years since the alluvial partly imbedded in the sandy soil. plain of the delta began to be formed, are trunk has branches, or roots, or a trace of frustrated. But the more one thinks of bark. None are upright. The structure the matter, the more does the impression of wood, which has not had time to decay of the antiquity of the plain grow; and I, before silicification, is usually preserved for my part, have no doubt that the ex-in its minutest details. The structure of treme term imagined by Herodotus for the filling up of the Arabian Gulf-twenty thousand years is very much below the time required for the formation of the delta.

Thus far we have traced the unwritten history of Egypt, and the gulf of the Mediterranean, postulated by Herodotus, is not yet in sight. Nevertheless, at a much more remote epoch-in that called miocene by geologists - the gulf was assuredly there.

Near the tombs of the caliphs at Cairo (according to Schweinfurth, two hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean), in the neighborhood of Sakkarah and in that of the great pyramids, the limestone rocks, which look so like a seashore, were found by Professor Fraas to display the remains of a veritable coast-line. For they exhibit the tunnels of boring marine mollusks (Pholades and Saxicava), and they are incrusted with acorn shells as if the surf had only lately ceased to wash them. At the feet of these former sea cliffs lie ancient sandy beaches, contain- |

Not a

these trunks is often obscure, as if they had decayed before silicification; and they are often penetrated, like other decayed wood, by fungi, which, along with the rest, have been silicified.*

Similar accumulations of fossil wood occur on the western side of the delta, about the Natron Lakes and in the Bahr bela-Ma.

All these trunks have weathered out of a miocene sandstone; and it has been suggested that when this sandstone was deposited, the Nile brought down great masses of timber from the upper country, just as the Mississippi sweeps down its "rafts "into the Gulf of Mexico at the present day; and that a portion of these, after long exposure and knocking about in the flood, became silted up in the sandy shores of the estuary.

See Unger, Der Versteinerte Wald bei Cairo, Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Akademie, 1858. Dr. Schweinfurth (Zur Beleuchtung der Frage ueber den versteinerten Wald, Zeitschrift der deutschen Geogrew where they are found, but his arguments do not logischen Gesellschaft, 1882) considers that the trees appear to me to be convincing.

The greater part of the "petrified forest" is at present one thousand feet above the level of the sea, in the midst of the heights which form the eastward continuation of the Mokattam. It has, therefore, shared in the general elevation of the land which took place after the beginning of the miocene epoch. That such elevation occurred is proved by the fact, that the marine beds of that period lie upon the upraised limestone plateau of Lower Egypt; and it must have reached seven or eight hundred feet, before the Pholades bored the rocky shore of the gulf of the delta.

of its denizens gave rise to the ooze, which has since hardened into chalk and nummulitic limestone. And it is quite certain that the whole of the area now occupied by Egypt, north of Esneh, and probably all that north of Assouan, was covered by tolerably deep sea during the cretaceous epoch. It is also certain that a great extent of dry land existed in south Africa at a much earlier period. How far it extended to the north is unknown, but it may well have covered the area now occupied by the great lakes and the basins of the White and Blue Niles. And it is quite possible that these rivers may have A flood of light would be thrown on existed and may have poured their waters the unwritten history of Egypt by a well-into the northern ocean, before the eledirected and careful re-examination of several points, to some of which I have directed your attention. For example, a single line of borings carried across the middle of the delta down to the solid rock, with a careful record of what is found at successive depths; a fairly exact survey of the petrified forest, and of the regions in which traces of the ancient miocene seashore occur; a survey of the Selsileh region, with a determination of the heights of the alluvial terraces between this point and Semneh; and an examination of the contents of the natural caves which are said to occur in the limestone rocks about Cairo and elsewhere, would certainly yield results of great importance. And it is to be hoped, that, before our occupation of the country comes to an end, some of the many competent engineer officers in our army will turn their attention to these matters.

But although so many details are still vague and indeterminate, the broad facts of the unwritten history of Egypt are clear enough. The gulf of Herodotus unquestionably existed and has been filled up in the way he suggested, but at a time so long antecedent to the furthest date to which he permitted his imagination to carry him, that, in relation to it, the historical period, even of Egypt, sinks into insignificance.

However, we moderns need not stop at the time when the delta was a gulf of the

vatory movement-possibly connected with the outpour of the huge granitic masses of the Arabian range and of Nubia commenced, which caused the calcareous mud covering its bottom to become the dry land of what is now the southern moiety of Upper Egypt, some time towards the end of the cretaceous epoch. Middle and northern Egypt remained under water during the eocene, and northern Egypt during the commencement, at any rate, of the miocene epoch; so that the process of elevation seems to have taken effect from south to north at an extremely slow rate. The northward drainage of the equatorial catchment basin thus became cut off from the sea by a constantly increasing plain sloping to the north. And, as the plain gradually rose, the stream, always flowing north, scooped the long valley of Nubia and of Egypt, and probably formed a succession of deltas which have long since been washed away. At last, probably in the middle, or the later part, of the miocene epoch, the elevatory movement came to an end, and the gulf of the delta began to be slowly and steadily filled up with its comparatively modern alluvium.

Thus, paradoxical as the proposition may sound, the Nile is not only older than its gift, the alluvial soil of Egypt, but it may be vastly older than the whole land of Egypt; and the river has shaped the casket in which the gift lies out of materials laid by the sea at its feet in the days of its youth.

tions, a marine deposit, which probably | ber of that body, who, if he were not is of the same age as the miocene beaches restrained by his colleagues, would enof Cairo and Memphis, forms the floor of deavor to abolish the traditional studies the delta. Above this, come the layers of of the school, and set the sixth form sand with gravel already mentioned, as working at the generation of gases and evidencing a former swifter flow of the the dissection of crayfishes, to the excluriver: then follow beds of mud and sand; sion of your time-honored discipline in and only above these, at three distinct Greek and Latin. levels, evidences of human handiwork, the last and latest of which belong to the age of Ramses II.

It is eminently desirable that these statements should be verified, for the doubts which have been thrown, to some extent justly, upon various attempts to judge the age of the alluvium of the Nile do not affect the proof of the relative antiquity of the human occupation of Egypt, which such facts would afford; and it is useless to speculate on the antiquity of the Egyptian race, or the condition of the delta when men began to people it, until they are accurately investigated.

To put the matter very gently, that statement is unhistorical; and I selected my topic for the discourse which I have just concluded, in order that I might show you, by an example, the outside limits to which my scientific fanaticism would carry me, if it had full swing. Before the fall of the second empire, the French liberals raised a cry for "Liberty as in Austria." I ask for "Scientific Education as in Halicarnassus," and that the culture given at Eton shall be, at any rate, no narrower than that of a Greek gentleman of the age of Pericles.

Herodotus was not a man of science, in the ordinary sense of the word; but he was familiar with the general results obtained by the "physiologists "of his day, and was competent to apply his knowledge rationally. If he had lived now, a corresponding education would certainly have put him in possession of the very simple facts which I have placed before you; and the application to them of his own methods of reasoning would have taken him as far as we have been able to go. But, thirty years ago, Herodotus could not have obtained as much knowl edge of physical science as he picked up at Halicarnassus in any English public school.

As to the ethnological relations of the Egyptian race, I think all that can be said is, that neither the physical nor the philological evidence, as it stands, is very satisfactory. That the Egyptians are not negroes is certain, and that they are to tally different from any typical Semites is also certain. I am not aware that there are any people who resemble them in character of hair and complexion, except the Dravidian tribes of central India, and the Australians; and I have long been inclined to think, on purely physical grounds, that the latter are the lowest, and the Egyptians the highest, members of a race of mankind of great antiquity, Long before I had anything to do with distinct alike from Aryan and Turanian the affairs of Eton, however, the Governon the one side, and from negro and ne-ing Body had provided the means of giv grito on the other. And it seems to me ing such instruction in physical science that the philologists, with their "Cush- as it is needful for every decently eduites" and "Hamites" are tending towards a similar differentiation of the Egyptian stock from its neighbors. But, both on the anthropological and on the philological sides, the satisfactorily ascertained facts are few and the difficulties multitudinous.

cated Englishman to possess. I hear
that my name is sometimes peculiarly
connected (in the genitive case) with cer
tain new laboratories; and if it is to go
down to posterity at all, I would as soon
it went in that association as any other,
whether I have any claim to the left-
handed compliment or not.
But you
must recollect_that_nothing which has
been done, or is likely to be done, by the
Governing Body, is the doing of this or
that individual member; or has any other
end than the deepening and widening of
the scheme of Eton education, until, with-
out parting with anything ancient that is
of perennial value, it adds all that modern
training which is indispensable to a com-
prehension of the conditions of modern

I have addressed you to-night in my private capacity of a student of nature, believing, as I hope with justice, that the discussion of questions which have long attracted me, would interest you. But I have not forgotten, and I dare say you have not, that I have the honor to stand in a very close official relation to Eton as a member of the Governing Body. And I have reason to think that, in some quarters, I am regarded as a dangerous mem-life.

T. H. HUXLEY.

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