ig8 



NA rURE 



[July i, 1897 



my publishers than uf myself, ihat this opinion of his is not 

 shared by the writer of any one, so far as I have seen, of the 

 notices which have appeared in other papers. 



William A. Tilden. 

 Royal College of Science, London, June 19. 



The Gravitation Constant. 

 I BEG to point out that at the end of the article on pp. 127- 

 128 of Nature, relating to my researches on the gravitation 

 constant, there is a misprint. The " oscillation " result for 1892 

 should be 5*523 instead of 5 '520. 



The error is not great, but by correcting it a much better 

 concordance appears between the four principal values. 



Charles Braun. 

 Mariaschein in Bohemia, June 21. 



THE AMERICAN EXCA VA TIONS IN 

 SOUTHERN BABYLONIA. 

 T7OR the last fifteen or sixteen years we have been glad 

 ^ to watch the endeavours of the Americans to carry 

 out systematic excavations in Southern Babylonia, and 

 we feel sure that. all will rejoice with them now that they 

 are able to report a very considerable success. It will 

 be remembered that the first American to visit that 

 country Avith a view of acquiring antiquities was Mr. 

 Hayes Ward, who went out there early in the " eighties " ; 

 and the report which he gave on the matter probably 

 helped forward the later expeditions of Dr. Peters and 

 Mr. Haynes. Dr. Peters and a small party of promising 

 young men went to Baghdad in 1890,, and set out from 

 that city for the ruins of Nififer, which are situated a few 

 days' journey to the south-west, where they began to dig. 

 For various reasons, how^ever, Dr. Peters withdrew from 

 the work soon afterwards, and the Committee of Excava- 

 tions of Pennsylvania University determined to place the 

 undertaking in the hands of Mr. Haynes, then the 

 American Consul at Baghdad. Mr. Haynes took over 

 the work, and for some years past he has devoted all his 

 time to it, through the heats of summer when the land 

 is burnt as hard as a brick, and through the rains of 

 winter and early spring when the plains become seas of 

 mud, has he lived at Nififer, patiently digging through the 

 ruins of the temple, and tower, and ramparts, and court- 

 yard, and hidden chambers of that ancient city. No 

 other excavator has done his work so thoroughly, or 

 so well in consequence, for he never left his post whilst 

 diggings were going on ; and though the cuneiform 

 scholar sitting in a comfortable chair at home reading 

 the descriptions of the work by Dr. Hilprecht ^ may think 

 lightly of such devotion to science, it by no means 

 diminishes its value. Moreover, the Arab of the neigh- 

 bourhood of Nififer is not the gentlest of men ; on the 

 contrary, when he is displeased with the " Frangi " ex- 

 cavator, he will break his water-jars, or slit his water-skins 

 as they are passing on donkeys to the river, or try to 

 burn down his tents, or even to kill him, as he has done 

 to more than one excavator. 



In the limited space at our disposal we do not intend 

 to describe the details of Mr. Haynes' excavations, but 

 only to call attention to the general results of his work 

 and their bearings upon the early history of civilisation 

 in the East. Like all the cities which lie between the 

 Tigris and Euphrates below Hillah and Baghdad, the 

 mounds of Nififer contain the ruins of a temple of con- 

 siderable size and of a tower ; both rested upon a solid 

 clay platform, the intention of the architect being to lift 

 the buildings which were to be set upon it out of the 

 reach of floods and overflows of the river. Round these 

 i-an a wall more than fifty feet in thickness, the object of 

 which was, naturally, to keep out foes from the temple 



1 "The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania," vol. i., 

 1893 J vol. ii., i8q6. (Philadelphia: Reprinted from Trans. Amer. Philos 

 Soc, N.S., vol. xviii., Nos. i and 3.) 



NO. 1444, VOL. 56] 



buildings and tower. The ruins which Mr. Haynes 

 found on the platform belong to the temple and tower 

 which a king called Ur-gur built about 2600 B.C. ; but 

 below this, Mr. Haynes found another platform which 

 Sargon I. had built some twelve hundred years earlier, 

 for all the bricks bore the name of this king and of his 

 son Naram-Sin. Digging down deeper, Mr. Haynes 

 found the ruins of one or more temples, but there are no 

 inscriptions or marks upon any object which will help us 

 to date them. Elsewhere in the outlying buildings in 

 the mound small but strongly built chambers were found, 

 and it is thought that these were employed for the safe 

 keeping of records, tablets, and the like. Thus it seems 

 that the oldest inscribed object discovered at NifFer 

 belongs to the reign of Sargon I., who, according to the 

 information given on the famous Cylinder of Nabonidus, 

 reigned 3200 years before that king's time. The question 

 which will naturally be asked next is, " To what period 

 do the temples, the ruins of which were found beneath 

 Sargon's platform, belong 1 and who built them ? " At 

 present it is impossible to give a satisfactory answer. 

 Those who would reckon years by the depth of deposits 

 say these temple-ruins are about 2000 years older than 

 Sargon's platform ; but this is, after all, only a guess, and 

 if probabilities are taken into consideration we might 

 as well date them at 10,000 B.C. as 6000 B.C., and we 

 deprecate the use of exact figures in such matters. What 

 is to be considered is the fact that about 3800 B.C. Sargon 

 was able to build such a strong fortress, and that all the 

 faculties of civilisation which such a power implied 

 existed at that remote date. As to the earlier buildings 

 which he found there and the platform on which they 

 rested, they probably only stood upon the ruins of earlier 

 buildings and of an earlier platform, and the site of 

 NifFer being favourable for a city, it is more than likely 

 that one stood there from time immemorial. To attempt 

 to limit a civilisation of such antiquity as that of Southern 

 Babylonia by thousands of years is, in our opinion, 

 futile ; though figures are useful at times to convey to 

 the non-expert a general idea of antiquity. Mr. Haynes 

 has proved that Nififer, in common with Tell-Lo, was 

 oiie of a number of large and important cities which 

 flourished in Southern Babylonia between 4000 B.C. and 

 2500 B.C., and the materials which he has obtained will 

 enable us to describe the knowledge and religion, and 

 manners and customs of its people with a fulness and 

 minuteness hitherto impossible. We trust that he will 

 soon give us his own account of the work which he has 

 carried out, and meanwhile accord him our thanks for 

 what he has already done, and congratulations upon the 

 great success which he has achieved. 



THE FRESHWATER FAUNA OF LAKE 

 TANGANYIKA. 



THE aquatic faunas of the great lakes of Central 

 Africa, although like so many other features of the 

 dark continent still largely unexplored, have attracted a 

 good deal of attention during the last few years. It has 

 been ascertained that some of these great sheets of water^ 

 although physiographically apparently so similar, are 

 absolutely unlike each other in respect to the aquatic 

 animals they contain. Thus the fishes and molluscs of 

 Nyasa, which have been up to the present time by far 

 the most completely known, show no forms which 

 have deviated widely from easily recognisable fresh' 

 water stocks, or that suggest that Nyasa has at any 

 past time been more directly connected with the sea. 

 On the other hand, one of the first items of zoological in- 

 formation which reached Europe concerning Tanganyika, 

 was the discovery of a Craspidote medusa by Boehm in 

 1893. The mere existence of fresh-water medusas is such 

 a rare and remarkable occurrence, that scientific interest 



