58o 



NA rURE 



[April 21, 1892 



ground, what to plant, planting, pruning, cost and returns 

 per acre, the renovating of old orchards, gathering, pack- 

 ing and distributing, storing and preserving, grafting, 

 budding, and stocks. These chapters form the first part 

 of the book. The second part consists of counsels on 

 various subjects to private growers, and in the third the 

 author deals with insect pests and disease. The work 

 is essentially practical, and will tend to stimulate the 

 development of what ought to become a more and more 

 important British industry. 



Blowpipe Analysis. By J. Landauer. Authorized English 

 Edition. By James Taylor. Second Edition. (London : 

 Macmillan and Co., 1892.) 



Dr. Landauer's work presents so much sound know- 

 ledge in so compact a form that the fact of the English 

 version of it having reached a second edition is in no way 

 surprising. The text, we are informed in the preface, has 

 been completely revised, and new methods of approved 

 value have been incorporated. The author and the 

 translator call especial attention to the fact that some 

 additional details of manipulation will be found of value 

 by readers who are working up the subject without a 

 teacher. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



[ The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions ex- 

 pressed by his correspondents. Neither can he undertake 

 to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected 

 manuscripts intended for this or any other part of iixTU^n. 

 No notice is taken of anonymous communications, '\ 



Prehistory of Egypt. 

 The evidences of denudation are so striking in the ravines of 

 the Egyptian deserts, that I make the following notes, hoping 

 that some trained geologist will be induced to do more for the 

 subject. The successive periods which I have noted are as 

 follow : — 



(1) Rainfall, before much excavation of the Nile bed ; pro- 

 ducing an enormous river with rolled gravels and blocks up to 

 3 feet long. It is unlikely that this was merely a beach, as the 

 gravels extend for many miles north and south ; nor would it be 

 estuarine, as the flow must have been rapid. The only parts of 

 these beds that I have seen are on the tops of the hills dividing 

 the Nile from the Fayum, which are entirely composed of these 

 gravels. The great mass of these beds has been denuded away 

 by the later Nile and rainfall, leaving these ridges 200-300 feet 

 above the present Nile. 



(2) Rainfall and elevation. All over the desert plateau of 

 limestone, the strata of which are usually horizontal, there are 

 sharp depressions and faults. These are usually of small area, 

 a quarter to half a mile across, with a drop of over 200 feet. 

 The strata are at the same level, and horizontal, on the opposite 

 sides of these depressions, but are steeply curved and faulted 

 down into the hollows. The only cause seems to be the falling 

 in of immense caverns in the limestone, for there is no trace of 

 thrust or upward folding anywhere. Such caverns must have 

 been produced by great rainfall, and high elevation to allow of 

 the water draining off at so low a level, below that of the 

 present Nile. 



(3) Disturbances. It is impossible to suppose that the great 

 gravel beds of the Nile in period (i) were deposited along the 

 steep edge of a basin 400-500 feet deeper ; hence the deep 

 Fayum basin must have been depressed (as it can scarcely have 

 been eroded) subsequently to the period (i), and probably during 

 the same disturbances which shook down the strata into the 

 caverns of (2). 



(4) Great rainfall and elevation continued, during which the 

 present Nile bed has been eroded, and the ravines graved out in 

 its sides, reaching back for many miles through solid rock. This 

 was subsequent to (3), as the ravines were partly determined by 

 the subsidences, and have cut through them. This was a long 

 period to allow of 200-300 feet of rock to be cut out of the Nile 

 bed. The elevation was probably the same as in (3), as the | 

 rock bed of the Nile is at a great depth under deposits in Lower 



NO. I 1 73, VOL. 45] 



Egypt. The rainfall was violent, as the sides of narrow ridges 

 of rock, which cannot have collected much, are grooved into 

 deep flutings all along ; and the waterfalls from basins of only 

 one or two square miles, are wide and steeply cut. 



(5) Rainfall, and depression forming an estuary. Up to 

 about 300 feet above the present Nile, remains of perfectly 

 horizontal beds oi debris may be found clinging to the sides of 

 the ravines, which must be subaqueous deposits. In front of 

 each of the ravines are foot-hills of debris, evidently washed out 

 of the ravines, and deposited in an estuary. There cannot have 

 been much current in the main valley, as these foot-hills extend 

 sometimes two miles outward ; yet there was some current, as 

 they are always on the lower side. This appears to be in the 

 human age, from the rolled river palseolith which I found at 

 Esneb, and which cannot have belonged to a later time. These 

 estuarine beds occur as far up as Tel el-Amarna or further. 



(6) Rainfall, gradual and intermittent elevation, leaving various 

 levels of foot-hills in the estuary. To this belong the chipped 

 flints of the debris beds in front of the ravine of the kings at 

 Thebes, as man was probably inhabiting that valley, for these to 

 have been washed out of it. The rainfall continued until the 

 estuary was completely dried, as the watercourses have cut 

 down to the prisent Nile level. Nile mud began to be brought 

 down and deposited while the water was yet 30 feet above the 

 present, either as a river or estuary. 



(7) Complete desiccation, throughout the historic age. The 

 roads marked out with stones on the plain at Tel el-Amarna in 

 1400 B.C. are only destroyed in the very lowest lines of the 

 watercourses. The ancient buildings in Egypt only show the 

 effects of rare storms, and not of continued rain. The mud 

 deposits throughout this age are at an average rate of 4 inches 

 per century in the old bed of the Nile. 



The sequence described here seems to be tolerably clear, 

 though much more detail needs to be filled in as yet. 



W. M. Flinders Petrie. 



Aphanapteryx in the New Zealand Region. 



I sent you a short note some weeks ago announcing the 

 discovery of a species of the Mauritian genus Aphanapteryx — 

 which I had named Aphanapteryx hawkinsi— in the Chatham 

 Islands. I have just returned thence from a visit made ex- 

 pressly for the purpose of searching for further remains of this 

 bird, of which I received at first only the cranium. I have 

 been very fortunate in my search, and have procured several 

 most perfect crania, with tibiae and femora, which I have no 

 doubt belong to the same bird, as more than once I discovered 

 these bones in the immediate neighbourhood of the crania. The 

 bones have been disinterred from the lower beds of a sandbank 

 facing the shore. Some years ago, a great storm, followed, as I 

 am told, by a tidal wave of great height, broke the Eurybia- 

 protected shore bluff ; and now the wind, having carried off the 

 upper bed of light-coloured sand into the lands behind, is 

 continually planing down more and more the brown lower bed 

 in which these bones seem mostly to be entombed. They are 

 in a most perfect state of preservation, and very complete, 

 though deprived of all their animal matter. Of the Aphana- 

 pteryx crania some are considerably larger and some much 

 smaller than A. Brceckei, the larger reaching to within -}-^ inch 

 of 6 inches from the top of the slender arched upper mandible 

 to the occiput. The tibiae and femora vary in size corresponding 

 to the differences in the crania ; but they present the main 

 characters of the bones figured by M. Milne-Edwards in his 

 " Oiseaux fossiles de la France." It may yet turn out that 

 more than one species of Aphanapteryx inhabited the Chatham 

 Islands. It is very singular that, among the thousands of bones 

 that have been collected from different swamps, Maori middens, 

 and caves in various parts of New Zealand, not a single bone of 

 this bird should have come to light. In one refuse heap from a 

 Moriori feast laid bare by the wind on the beach of Petre Bay, 

 I found several specimens of Aphanapteryx hawkinsi, along 

 with crania and other bones of ducks, swan, sea-birds, 

 seals, whales, &c. Swan-bones were everywhere very 

 abundant in this brown sand bed ; some of them indicating 

 birds equal in size to Chenopis atrata, others considerably 

 exceeding it. In one very ancient midden the remains I 

 dug up consisted almost entirely of swan-bones, with the 

 intermixture of only a few duck-bones. The Aphanapteryx 

 must, I think, be the wingless bird spoken of by the Morioris as 

 Mehiriki, although those to whom the skull has been 



