Study of the New York Obelisk as a Decayed Boulde7\ 121 



iiated, corrodes and eats away the foundations of the monument. 

 The Grand Temple holds itself up, only because it is supported by 

 the soil in which it is plunged. Naturally there is not a temple in 

 Egypt where the fall of walls happens more frequently.'" 



Elsewhere, he repeats: "For many years the grand Temple of 

 Karnak has been assailed, more than any other Egyptian temple, 

 by the infiltration of the Nile, whose water, saturated with nitre, 

 eats away the sandstone;" and again, "Karnak has found its prin- 

 cipal enemy in the nitre that corrodes the base of its walls. "^ 



Dr. Rossiter W. Raymond has also called my attention to the 

 deep disintegration and scaling away which he observed at the 

 bases of the great pillars in this Temple, and which can also be 

 readily distinguished in some photographs. My brother, Rev\ 

 Matthew C. Julien, recently in Egypt, informs me that he also 

 observed the same scaling on the vertical walls at the entrance of 

 the Serapoeum. 



There can be no question of the decay and serious damage which 

 have been caused, in Egypt, as elsewhere, by efflorescent salts, but, 

 in that country, only on porous sandstone, in enclosures whose soil 

 it; saturated with these salts in the immediate vicinity of filthy Arab 

 villages, and to a height of but a few feet above the ground, rarely 

 over a yard. 



Therefore, although an early description of ancient Ale.xandria 

 refers to its "battlements decayed and the stones corroded and dis- 

 figured by saltpetre,"^ there is no evidence nor probability of an}^ 

 granite obelisk having suffered exfoliation from this agency. 



(e). Erosive solution by the Nile-waters or Nile-mud. This 

 theory, often suggested, of attack by the Nile-waters, or by organic 

 acids of the rich black soil of the Land of Cham, I think, has not 

 been supported by observed facts. No such decay surrounds the 

 shaft of the Obelisk of Heliopolis. Its base was found, by the 

 French expedition in 180T, to be buried in the alluvial plain to the 

 depth of 1.88 meters* ((i feet, 2 inches), of which Wilkinson found 

 that 5 feet, 10 inches had accumulated during the last 1700 years. 

 The actual ri.se of the waters was found to have reached 1.52 meters 

 higher (5 feet), but no corresponding band of exfoliation is noted. 



Nor have the carved flutings and hieroglyphs suffered in sharp- 

 ness, on the colossal statue of Rameses II, once erected before the 



• Karnak, 7. 2 Monuments of Upper Egypt, 180, 197. 



3 Volney, op. cit., I, .5. * Histoire Naturelle, Texte, I, 407. 



Aknals N. Y. Acad. Sci., VIII, July, 1893.— 9 



