168 TRANSACTIONS OF THE [APR. 23, 
mouth of the river Antelias, a considerable number of flint 
knives and many bones of still existing animals have been found. 
Flint implements have also been found on the surface of the 
sands south of Ras Beirit. 
A student of the Syrian Protestant College brought to its 
museum the calvarium, lower jaw, and part of the pelvis and 
femur of a man, imbedded in a stalagmitic deposit taken from a 
cave north of Beirit. Unfortunately he did not know the lo- 
cality or the circumstances under which the specimen had been 
obtained. 
Among the objects of interest along the coast is the Hocene 
deposit of the Lattakia Plain. This bed of marl is elevated from 
250 to 350 feet above the sea, and deeply furrowed by the 
branches of the streams which empty into the sea south of Lat- 
takia. In the gray soil washed down the sides of these ravines 
are immense numbers of shells, many of them in an excellent 
state of preservation. More than forty species were collected 
by the author in 1884, and the deposit has been described in an 
article in Mature in 1885. Similar deposits will doubtless be 
found in the plain of ’Akkar and the Marqab. The writer 
found a similar deposit half-way to the summit of the hill above 
the town of Zante, on the island of the same name. This de- 
posit was described in Nature for 1887. 
The second strip consists of the westernmost of the two great 
mountain ranges, and begins at Ras Mohammed, at the head of 
the Red Sea proper, at the junction of the Gulfs of Suez and 
’Aqabah. The rugged range of Sinai, which occupies most of the 
peninsular triangle between the two gulfs of the Red Sea, rises 
steeply from Ras Mohammed to the peaks of Um-Shomer 8,300 
feet, Jebel Catarina 8,400 feet, Jebel Musa, 7,600 feet, and then 
sinks gradually to the sandy plain of Debbet-er-Ramleh, which 
joins the heads of the two gulfs, and separates the range of Sinai 
from the plateau of the Tih-Jebel Serbal, a lateral spur of the 
Sinaitic range, half-way from Ras Mohammed to Debbet-er- 
Ramleh, projects like a gigantic bastion to the west, overhanging 
the sandy plain of Tér. The highest peak of this lateral range 
reaches an altitude of 6,500 feet. 
It is difficult to conceive a wilder scene of rugged desolation 
than that which is unrolled before the view from the summit of 
the Sinaitic range. ‘The entire absence of vegetation, and even 
of soil, gives to the landscape the sharp outlines and the vivid 
colors of a geological chart. The valleys are for the most part 
narrow and tortuous, with steep, often precipitous sides, their 
floor being nothing but the bed of an occasional winter torrent, 
and strewn with gravel and boulders. In a few places there are 
high banks of gravel and soil on one or both sides of the valley, 
