NATURE 



M5 



THURSDAY, JUNE l8, 1891. 



EG YP TIAN IRRIGA TION. 



THE "Note" on the above subject by Sir Colin 

 Moncrieff, which we publish this week, will prove 

 pleasant reading to all who have the welfare of Egypt at 

 heart. To those who have known that country inti- 

 mately in the past, the brief record of progress in irri- 

 gation since the British occupation will recall the horrors 

 of the corvee, and the torturing of the wretched peasantry 

 by tyrannical farmers of the taxes ; and to engineers the 

 record will imply, not only that all those atrocities have 

 been abolished, but further that some of the most difficult 

 and important engineering problems of recent times have 

 been successfully solved by Sir Colin Moncrieff and the 

 able staff under his control. Nothing is exaggerated, but 

 we have in the " Note" a plain and modest statement of 

 the quiet and unostentatious execution of works the 

 mere discussion of the difficulties of which had occupied 

 the time of the predecessors of Sir Colin for the previous 

 quarter of a century without anything useful resulting. 



It will be only necessary to refer to one or two matters 

 to establish this proposition. In paragraph 10, Sir Colin 

 announces that the Barrage has been completed, and 

 placed in a condition to fulfil its original purpose, for the 

 sum of about ^460,000. Contrast this with the published 

 statement of M. Linant, a former engineer-in-chief of the 

 Egyptian Government, who, in 1872, expressed a doubt 

 whether it would not cost more to repair the existing 

 Barrage than to build an entirely new one, and further 

 says: "If, at the time when the Barrage was com- 

 menced, steam-engines had been what they are to-day, 

 one would certainly have advised Mehemet Ali to abandon 

 his project of a Barrage for the establishment of pumping- 

 machinery." Even at that time, M. Linant thought it was 

 not too late to consider whether it would not be better to 

 abandon the idea of repairing the Barrage ; and to assist 

 in the determination of the question he submitted an 

 estimate of the cost of pumping, amounting to ^465,000 

 per annum, which, he thought, the cultivators could well 

 afford to pay. 



We have already stated that Sir Colin Moncrieff has 

 effected the same result by a single expenditure of 

 ^460,000 instead of by an annually recurring one of 

 ^{^465,000. By means of the completed Barrage the 

 whole summer supply of the Nile is thrown on to the 

 lands, so obviously there is no work for pumps, and the 

 vast cost of the same is saved to the country. Although 

 national feeling runs high in France, we cannot but think 

 that French engineers will rejoice that the world-re- 

 nowned Barrage of the Nile, the design of which by M. 

 Mongel was approved of by the Council of the Fonts et 

 Chaussdes in 1842, and carried into execution during the 

 ensuing ten years, has at last, after thirty years' practical 

 inutility and failure, been finally completed by their 

 worthy compeers and successors in Egypt— the British 

 engineers — whose experience, gained in the great irrigation 

 works of our Indian Empire, has been as zealously 

 utilized in securing the success of a great French work 

 as it would have been in carrying out a new one of their 

 own design. 



NO, I 129, VOL. 44] 



One other matter in Sir Colin Moncrieff's " Note " may 

 be referred to— namely, the drainage recently effected 

 No doubt, the fact enforced upon Indian engineers by. 

 numberless experiences— that high-level perennial irri- 

 gation must be accompanied by drainage works if soil 

 and people are to remain in a healthy condition — was not 

 well known to the French projectors of summer irrigation 

 works in Egypt ; and, as a consequence, whereas magni- 

 ficent canals carrying 5000 cubic feet and upwards per 

 second were constructed, no corresponding means were 

 provided for draining the superfluous and often saline 

 water off the lands. Sir Colin tells us that the mileage 

 of the drains at present is not less than 1500. When we 

 consider that, in addition to these vast works of improved 

 irrigation and drainage, a steady reclamation of marsh- 

 land has been going on, we have reason as a nation to be 

 proud of the good work which our countrymen have 

 carried on in Egypt ; as, whatever may happen in the 

 future, the fact of the British occupation will, from its 

 successful applications of science, be indelibly stamped 

 upon the face of the country for all time, and its memory 

 will for other reasons live honourably in the traditions of 

 the emancipated and much-enduring fellaheen. 



PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. 



Leitfaden der physiologischen Psychologie. In 14 

 Vorlesungen. Von Dr. Th. Ziehen, Docent in Jena. 

 (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1891.) 



THIS little volume will be welcome to a good many 

 students of psychology, both in Germany and 

 beyond. Anyone who has had to look up the newer re- 

 searches in experimental psychology in Germany knows 

 the serious difficulty of gaining easy access to them. 

 They are scattered over a whole heterogeneous mass of 

 serial and other publications. Now we have to look into 

 an avowedly psychological journal or brochure, but more 

 frequently still into physiological works, and not in- 

 frequently into journals for psychiatry. The explanation 

 is obvious. Psychology, in passing into the objective and 

 experimental phase, is broadening its base to an almost 

 perplexing extent, and is encroaching more especially 

 on the domain of physiology. Hence the need of a 

 volume like the present work, which aims at giving the 

 beginner a conspectus of the psychological field. We 

 want such a book badly in English, the only available one, 

 that of Prof. Ladd, being at once incomplete on certain 

 sides, and in part too metaphysical. Meantime we can 

 recommend Dr. Ziehen's "Vorlesungen" as exceedingly 

 well adapted to give the student a clear idea of the scope 

 and the methods of the new science of physiological 

 psychology. 



Dr. Ziehen marks off physiological from what he calls 

 transcendental psychology by the differentia that it deals 

 with psychical processes as attached to cerebral functions. 

 Psychophysic, the branch of investigation opened up by 

 Weber and Fechner, he includes under physiological 

 psychology as that part which aims at exact measurement. 

 This seems to be a satisfactory way of mapping out the 

 ground. The standpoint of the physiological psychologist 

 is indicated in the assumption that every psychical process 

 must be thought of as having a concomitant physiological 



H 



