582 



NA TURE 



[April i8, 1901 



understood in these days, and it is impossible to assign 

 correct meanings to them until we know the exact signi- 

 fication of every word which occurs in them. 



The weak part of Mr. Schmidt's argument is that, even 

 supposing all his statements about dates in the Sothic 

 year were correct and could be proved, he does not allow 

 a sufficient number of Sothic years to cover the long 

 period of years in which the Egyptian civilisation was 

 evolved, and developed, and matured, and decayed ; and 

 it seems to us absurd to limit this period to three Sothic 

 years, or 4380 ordinary years. Mr. Schmidt's system of 

 chronology is worth no more than any other in which a 

 large amount of "playing at doing sums" occurs, and he 

 has merely put together in book form a series of notes 

 and extracts from the works of Egyptologists, and from 

 those of writers like Bunsen and Cory, which he has 

 arranged according to his own peculiar views ; the result 

 is a perfectly unreadable volume of 569 pages, in which 

 the " omissions " of one ancient authority and the " mis- 

 takes " of another are paraded in a bewildering manner. 

 We have no wish to be flippant or to treat Mr. Schmidt's 

 book in other than a serious manner, but his conclusions 

 remind us forcibly of the result of the investigations into 

 the date of the building of the Tower of Babel of the 

 eminent English divine who declared that the " last brick 

 was laid on the top stage of the Tower of Babel at 

 Borsippa at 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 15, B.C. 2247." 

 We cannot possess a continuous and accurate chronology 

 of Egypt until we know how many kings reigned between 

 Mena and Nectanebus, and how many years each 

 reigned, and who succeeded whom ; to make such a 

 chronology at present is impossible because the necessary 

 data do not exist. The writer who assigns precise dates 

 to certain events in Egyptian history, e.g. the date B.C. 

 4244 to "the establishment of the kingdom," probably 

 deserves to be considered either a "crank" or a charlatan, 

 and in any case the presumption of the writer who asserts 

 definitely that the lonians were settled on the shores of 

 " Greece and Asia Minor as far back as the reign of Teta, 

 or 3146 B.C." is stupendous. 



We are not reassured on the matter of Mr. Schmidt's 

 scholarship when we find such blunders and spellings as 

 the following : Puon-et, p. 7, uae (there is no such word) 

 p. 9, Hyk-sat-u, p. 13, Rokchoris, p. 14, Tarako, p. 14, 

 Sothiac, p. 16 and passim., Sopdet, p. 17, Uon-nofer, 

 p. 20, Anu, p. 27, Ach-i-u, Ta-an-nut, p. 30, Pa-api, p. 35, 

 Amen-em-het, p. 49, Rohk-nez, p. 52, Num, p. 61, User- 

 tasen, p. 81, Quebahu, p. 105, the identification of Ta-anut 

 {sic) with This, the derivation of the Hebrew name 

 " Adam " from that of Mena, the first historical king of 

 Egypt (!), p. 117, Hus-et and Hus-ir, p. 122, Per-son, p. 

 131, Osiropis, p. 253, Zawyet-el-Arrian, p. 268, Elephan- 

 tinasn, ibid.; this list might be increased almost in- 

 definitely. Mr. Schmidt looks upon the story of the 

 Flood as an allegory which he interprets thus. Noah 

 was born B.C. 2948, and the Flood " broke loose " over 

 the land B.C. 2348 ; Thebes became independent B.C. 

 2948, and the Xlth, Xllth and Xlllth dynasties of kings 

 reigned exactly 600 years, i.e. a period equal to the age 

 of Noah when the Flood "broke loose." According to 

 ■ Mr. Schmidt the Flood was no flood of water, but an in- 

 vasion of Hyksos, and the ark to which Noah and his 

 family, &c., fled was nothing else than the city of 

 NO. 1642, VOL. 63) 



Thebes, because the Hebrew word for ark is Tebhd/u 

 and this, according to Mr. Schmidt, is the name of the 

 city called Thebes. The sending forth of the dove from 

 the ark is another part of the allegory, and means that 

 Noah and his sons sent forth from Thebes messengers to 

 the Hyksos offering their submission, which was duly 

 accepted, and payment of tribute imposed upon them ! 



From reasoning of this kind the reader will easily be 

 able to gauge Mr. .Schmidt's qualifications as a reformer 

 of the chronology of Egypt ; as a final proof of the cor- 

 rectness of his views on this subject he points triumphantly 

 to the fact that the fifteen cubits of height above the 

 mountains which the waters reached at the time of the 

 Flood refers to the depth of the waters of the annual Nile 

 inundation, which he declares to be exactly fifteen cubits 

 at Heliopolis ! When he deals with Babylonian questions 

 Mr. Schmidt is equally unfortunate, for on p. 545 he 

 gravely refers to ^ife discovery of a tablet "recording the 

 war waged by Khammurabi against Eri-aku and his 

 Elamite allies" ; a reformer of Mr. Schmidt's pretensions, 

 should at least have shown that he had read that thisj 

 "discovery" was exploded finally by Mr. L. W. King ii 

 the first volume of his " Letters of Khammurabi," publishec 

 in 1898, for, as now stated by Mr. Schmidt, his arguments 

 fall to the ground. Before he writes another book of 

 "startling discoveries" we hope he will read the current 

 literature of the subject, and will remember that assertion 

 is not evidence, and that theories and hypotheses are not 

 proofs. 



ELECTRO-CHEMISTR Y. 

 Practical Electro-Chemistry. By G. Bertram Blount. 

 Pp xi-f374. (Westminster : A. Constable and Co., 

 Ltd., 1 901.) Price 15^'. net. 



ALTHOUGH the foundation on which electro- 

 chemistry is built was to a large extent laid by 

 the genius and splendid research work of two English- 

 men, Davy and Faraday, and is practically based on 

 the laws enunciated by the latter, yet to-day, when many 

 branches of industrial chemistry are being revolutionised 

 by the introduction of this branch of chemical science, 

 we as a nation know practically nothing about it. In 

 America we are confronted by numerous works upon the 

 subject ; if we turn to Germany, there again we find a 

 whole library of books devoted entirely to electro-chemical 

 science and to its industrial application. Turning to 

 our own country, what do we see ? One or two books on 

 electro-plating, books on electrical engineering, and a 

 few translations of German works on electro-chemical 

 analysis. 



It was, therefore, with sincere pleasure and eager an- 

 ticipation that one saw, in the publishers' announcements 

 at the end of last year, that Messrs. Constable and Co. 

 would shortly bring out a work on " Practical Electro- 

 chemistry," by Mr. Bertram Blount. The book which 

 is now published consists of eight sections devoted to 

 different branches of electro-chemistry. 



The first, or introductory, section treats in an interest- 

 ing manner of electrolysis and more or less of the theory 

 of solution. A useful subsection is also given on the 

 " Method of calculating output in electrolytic processes." 

 After discussing at no very great length a particular 



