Sept. 29, 1882.] 



• KNOWLEDGE 



293 



or palaces, or tempi 

 the name Bekhen is 



and, as M. Chabas has pointed out, 

 aetimes applied to the dwellings of 

 private persons. 



Although the Bekhen of the present papyrus is not 

 actually called Pa-Rameses, we are told that its name was 

 Aa-nekht, and Aa-nekht was the secondary name of Pa- 

 Rameses (see preceding footnote). Also, it was a new 

 Bekhen, which his majesty had "built for himself" ; and it 

 was stationed between Egypt and Palestine, which was the 

 precise position of the Land of Goshen ; and Rameses 

 Mer-Amen was "its God." Here, again, we have all the 

 conditions necessary to the identification of the Bekhen 

 Aanekht with the Pa-Rameses of the Aboo Simbel in- 

 scription, as well as with the '• Raamses " of the Bible. 



The following description of Pa-Rameses (evidently the 

 same Pa-Rameses) is from the pen of the scribe Amen-em- 

 apt, who writes to the scribe Panbesa, announcing the 

 arrival of the Pharaoh, Menephthah, then travelling in 

 Lower Egypt: — 



"Lo, here is one shall bring to thee this writing of 

 cadenced words. When thou receivest my letter, see that 

 thou takest .'JO bronze outen* — or rather 100 outen — from 

 the hand of the scribe Ra-aii for the use of the servitors in 



the divine abode (Temple) of Rameses Mer-Amen 



See that thou do it quickly, for behold Ba-en-ra Meramen 

 (Menephthah) to whom be life, health and strength, comes 



this way towards his birthplace in Heliopolis Ob, 



very bright is the day of Thy comingf 1 Oh, sweet is Thy 

 voice in speech ! It is Thou who has enclosed Pa-Rameses 

 with a wall — the frontier of the land of the foreigner ; the 

 boundary of Egypt, Oh, gracious Lord 1 the beautiful out- 

 post ; the tower adorned with lapis and tunjuoise ; the 

 exercise-ground of the cavalry ; the parade-ground of the 

 archers ; the landing-place of Thy maritime auxiliaries 

 who bring Thee tribute 1 Praises be to Thee who comest 

 with thy warriors discharging poisoned and burning 

 arrows ! The Shasu (Bedaween) flee when they behold the 

 Pharaoh," kc. 



In this e.xtract, the points to be especially noted are, 

 firstly, the allusion to the Temple of the deceased Pharaoh, 

 Rameses, deified ; secondly, the fact that this Pa-Rameses 

 is a frontier place on the side of the Shasu, or Bedaween 

 Arabs ; thirdly, that it was a place of communication by 

 water with th^ sea, and that the maritime auxiliaries came 

 thither in their galleys ; fourthly, that it had been enclosed 

 in a wall of circuit by the reigning Pharaoh, Menephthah 

 Ba-en-Ra Mer Amen, son and successor of Rameses II. 

 This last, as we shall hereafter see, is a point of much im- 

 portance. 



The statistics of longevity in Prussia are striking. In 

 December, 1880, there were living 359 persons who were 

 at least 100 years old, 128 of them being men and 231 

 women. Of the men, 32 were still married ; of the women, 

 five were. Twelve of the men had never married and nine 

 of the women never had. Of persons born between 1781 

 and 1790, 5,35.5 were stOl living, the men being 2,025 in 

 number and the women 3,330. The records further show 

 that the number of persons born in the last century and 

 still living — tlioso, therefore, who were at least eighty 

 years of age — reached a total of 77,668. 



• The ancient Egyptians had various metallic substitutes for coin, 

 which were used as conventional siprns of exchange. The bronze 

 oaten weighed 91 grammes. The subject of later Egyptian moneys 

 of the Ptolemaic period has been learnedly and exhaustively tieatcd 

 by M. Revillout, in his " Chrestomaf hie Demotique j " so solving 

 many problems that have long batBed both Egyptologists and 

 numismatists. 



t The scribe here breaks into an effusion addressed to Mencplitliah. 

 This change of tense is common in Egyptian texts. 



THE RAIN-BAND.* 



By C. Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for 

 Scotland. 



"ITJ'HAT may be done with the spectroscope in the 

 > > matter of weather is, for the present at lea-st, con- 

 fined almost entirely to the question of raiu — as. Will it 

 rain, or will it not ; and, if it will, heavily or lightly ? The 

 manner in which the spectroscope accomplishes this useful 

 part is by its capacity for showing whether there is more 

 or less than the usual quantity of watery ^■apour permeating 

 the otherwise dry gases in the upper parts of the atmo- 

 sphere, this watery vapour not being by any means the 

 visible clouds themselves, but the invisible water-gas out of 

 which they have to be formed, and by means of which, 

 when overabundant, they obtain their privilege for enacting 

 rainfall. So that never were wiser words uttered and more 

 terse philosophy than those which are to be found in the 

 ancient Book of -Job, wherein, of the wondrously " balanced 

 clouds " high up in mid-air, it is said, " They pour down 

 rain according to the vapour thereof." 



More or less of this water-vapour is always in the air, 

 even on the very clearest days, and a happy thing for men 

 that it is so : for, as Dr. Tyndall and others have well 

 shown, it moderates the excesses of hot solar radiation by 

 day and cold radiation of the sky at night, and is more 

 abundant in the hotter than the colder parts of the earth. 

 Wherefore, according largely to its temperature for the 

 time being, the air — otherwise consisting almost entirely of 

 nitrogen and oxygen — can sustain, and does assimilate, as 

 it were, a specified amount of this watery vapour, invisibly 

 to the naked eye, the microscope, or the telescope ; but not 

 so to the instrument of recent times, the spectroscope. 

 And if the air vertically aliove any one place becomes 

 presently charged with more than its usual dose of such 

 transparent watery vapour (as it easily may, by various 

 modes and processes of nature), the spectroscope shows 

 that fact immediately, even while the sky is still blue ; 

 clouds soon after form, or thicken if already formed, and 

 rain presently begins to descend. 



But how does the spectroscope show to the eye what is 

 declared to be invisible in all ordinary optical instruments? 

 It is partly by its power of discriminating the diflerently- 

 coloured rays of which white light is made up, and partly 

 by the quality impressed on the molecules of water at 

 their prim;eval creation, but only recently discovered, of 

 stopping out certain of those rays so discriminated and 

 placed iu a rainbow coloured order by the prism and slit of 

 the spectroscope, but transmitting others freely. Hence it 

 is that, on looking at the light of the sky through 

 any properly adjusted spectroscope, we see, besides the 

 Newtonian series of colours from red to violet, and 

 besides all the thin, dark Fraunhoftr, or solar origi- 

 nated lines, of which it is not my object now to speak, 

 we see, 1 say, in one very definite part — viz., between 

 the orange and yellow of that row of colours, or 

 " spectrum," as it is called — a dark, ha^y band stretching 

 across it. That is the chief baud of watery vapour ; 

 and to see it very dark, even black, do not look at a 

 dark part of the sky or at black clouds therein, but 

 look, rather, where the sky is brightest, fullest of light to 

 the naked eye, and where you can see through the greatest 

 length of such wcll-illumincd air, at a low, rather tlian 

 high, angle of altitude, and either in warm weather, or 

 above all, just before a heavy rainfall, when there is and 

 must be an extra supply of watery vapour in the atmo- 

 sphere. Any extreme darkness, therefore, seen in tliat water- 



• From the rims. 



