. GEOLOGY. 293 



of Mr. Robert Stephenson, the English engineer at Suez ; of M. Negretti, the 

 Austrian, at Tineh, near the ancient Pelusian, and the levelings of Messrs. 

 Talabat, Boardaloue, and their assistants, between the two seas, have proved 

 that the low-water mark of ordinary tides at Suez and Tineh is very nearly on 

 the same levels, the difference being that at Suez it is rather more than one 

 inch lower. Leonard Homer, Proc. Eoy. Soc., 1855. 



Conversion of the Arabian Desert into a Lake. Captain William Allan, of 

 the British navy, has published a book advocating the conversion of tho 

 Arabian Desert into an ocean. The author believes that the great valley 

 extending from the southern depression of the Lebanon range to the head of 

 the Gulf of Akaba, the eastern branch of the head of the Red Sea, has been 

 once an ocean. It is in many places 1,300 feet below the level of the Medi- 

 terranean, and in it are situated the Dead Sea and the Sea -of Tiberias. He 

 believes that this ocean, being cut off from the Red Sea by the rise of the 

 land at the southern extremity, and being only fed by small streams, gradu- 

 ally became dried by solar evaporation. He proposes to cut a canal of 

 adequate size from the head of the Gulf of Akaba to the Dead Sea, and 

 another from the Mediterranean, near Mount Carmel, across the plain of Es- 

 draelon, to the fissure in the mountain range of Lebanon. By this means the 

 Mediterranean would rush in, with a fall of 1,300 feet, fill up the valley, and 

 substitute an ocean of 2,000 square miles in extent for a barren, useless desert, 

 thus making the navigation to India as short as the overland route, spreading 

 fertility over a now arid country, and opening up the fertile regions of Pales- 

 tine to settlement and cultivation. 



OX THE OCCURRENCE OF FOSSIL BOXES IX THE AURIFEROUS 



ALLUVIUM OF AUSTRALIA. 



In a paper presented to the London Geological Society, Mr. Clarke states 

 that fossil bones of extinct mammalia have been found throughout a range 

 of eleven degrees of latitude, and at heights varying from one hundred feet 

 below to sixteen hundred feet and upward above the sea-level. The author 

 refers to the analogous occurrence of bones in gold-drift in the Ural and in 

 California ; and in the latter country, as in Australia, this drift is frequently 

 overspread with the products of volcanic outbursts, or with the debris of vol- 

 canic rocks. It would appear that a great part of the now diy land of these 

 countries was under the water when these osseous remains were buried ; and 

 probably the destruction of these mammalia at last was connected with the final 

 outbreak of igneous forces, which changed the horizon of considerable tracts, 

 and introduced a state of things incompatible with the existence of these, for 

 the most part, gigantic animals, now extinct. 



OX EARTHQUAKE PHEXOMEXA. 



The following report has been submitted to the French Academy, by M. de 

 Beaumont, Lame, and Lionville, charged to consider a memoir presented to 

 the Academy, by M. Alexis Perrey, Professor in the Faculty of Sciences, at 



