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forms of things, the marvellous features of the world in which 
we live; he purges our minds of harmful illusions and checks 
unwholesome sentiment. The poet, on the other hand, brings us 
musically and with emotion his discovery of the expression of the 
face of the world. To him the world and every fact in it, is 
translucent and looks beyond itself. 
We need the message and the help of both poet and scientist 
for restraint and inspiration. 

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4th, 1903. 
Fossil Hunting in the Libyan Desert. 
BY 
Dre. CHARLES. W. ANDREWS, FiGia3 
Of the British Museum. 
HE Lecture was mainly descriptive of the topography and 
geology of the Libyan desert which lies to the west of 
Egypt. It is but sparsely inhabited, subject to violent alternations 
of heat and cold, and often swept by suffocating sand storms, 
whilst rain is almost unknown. This vast wilderness, by its 
natural dryness and inaccessibility, proved peculiarly suitable for 
the preservation of the fossil remains of those strange mammals 
who were the denizens of the place during the upper Eocene, 
Oligocene and Miocene epochs. 
Dr. Andrews conducted most of his researches in the bed of 
a mighty river which seems like the ancestor of the Nile as we 
know it now. Many lantern slides were shown illustrating the 
remarkable diversity of its surface, the fantastic escarpments, the 
strange isolated bluffs cropping up from level plains like the 
monuments of a Titanic race rather than the work of natural 
agencies. The famous Sphinx, by the way, was shown to be one 
of these natural monuments, carved into shape afterwards by 
human agencies. A rich harvest of fossil forms, some absolutely 
unique and unlike any animals now existing or extinct forms 
hitherto discovered, was the Lecturer’s reward for many months’ 
life (under by no means congenial conditions) in this lonely and 
vast desert. Some of these fossils formed links in the evolution 
