358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Nile Valley here is bounded on each side by hills of Tertiary limestone on 

 whose flanks the present surface-soil rests without any intervening Qua- 

 ternary deposits. On the western or Libyan side these hills are pierced 

 by many dry ravines, or wadys, through which the desert sands make 

 their way down toward the cultivable strip of alluvial soil on the bank 

 of the river. Though Upper Egypt is a rainless region, still occasion- 

 ally, perhaps once in twenty years, heavy rains occur, and great tor- 

 rents tear their way down these wadys into the Nile. In the bottom 

 of such ravines, and occasionally on the elevated plateaus of the hills, 

 I succeeded after long and toilsome searching in finding several imple- 

 ments of the true St. Acheul type. I also found innumerable exam- 

 ples of all the various objects that are commonly discovered in other 

 countries, in which the existence of " the stone age " is considered to 

 be established. These were axes, scrapers, piercers, knives, flakes, nu- 

 clei, etc., together with some forms that were entirely novel, and all 

 without exception were made by the process of chipping. Although 

 polished implements have been occasionally discovered in Egypt, I 

 have never myself happened to find a single example. Some few objects 

 were met with in the eastern desert ; but on the Arabian side the val- 

 ley is so much wider that it is almost impossible to reach the hills in 

 one day and have any time left for searching. At Paris I showed the 

 objects I had discovered to M. de Mortellet, curator of the prehistoric 

 department of the great museum of St. Germain-en-Laye, under whose 

 charge had been placed the organization of the anthropological depart- 

 ment of the late French Exhibition. By him I was requested to place 

 them there, where they were seen and examined by many scholars 

 from various countries occupied with prehistoric studies, and by all 

 they were pronounced to be true palaeolithic objects. Quaternary de- 

 posits do not occur in the Nile Valley, so far as I am aware, though 

 they have been found in various parts of the Sahara. Consequently it 

 is only in such spots as those in which these implements were discov- 

 ered, that any relics of the early man can now be met with there. If 

 man lived in Egypt at that remote epoch, most traces of him must 

 now lie buried under hundreds of feet of Nile mud, the product of the 

 annual inundation of the river for countless ages. The discovery, 

 therefore, in the Nile Valley of all the usual types of objects of " the 

 stone age " in other countries, including those of the most remote times, 

 would seem to furnish a sufficient reply to the objections of such as 

 maintain that no traces of "the fossil man" have been discovered 

 in Egypt. 



