76 
and nearer than India on his eastern frontier he could not 
have found herds of this animal, while the Rutennu, a 
very Indo-Chinese looking race, brought as tribute to 
Egypt, in the reign of the great conqueror, the white 
elephant, painted red and white, with gilded ears and 
toes. Had the fame and terror of the Egyptian conqueror 
reached the confines of Burmah, and the princes of Indo- 
China propitiated the Egyptians with that expensive pre- 
sent, a whiteelephant. All this occurred about 1600 B.c., 
and eight centuries later, in the reign of Shalmanser II., the 
elephant, as a rare animal, figures on the obelisk found at 
Nimroud depicted in a style far inferior to the Egyptian. 
The mutilated mummy of Thothmes has been found at the 
~‘Deir-el-Bahari, and all that remains is inadequate to give 
an idea of his person. His successors came into conflict 
with the Khita, the supposed Hittites, but so did the 
Ptolemies long after the Hittite kingdom is supposed to 
whave been extinguished. The account of the Pharaoh 
. Khuenaten and the obscurity which prevails about the 
succession after that heretic, might have been enlarged, 
and a little more said about the Pharaoh Horus and the 
historical difficulties about his reign. The hypothesis of 
Brugsch Pacha, that he reigned twenty-one years, is 
plausible to superficial observation, but not acceptable on 
deeper reflection ; but these are Egyptological points not 
in the absolute province of an historian, unless on sepa- 
rate independent philological research. The theory of 
Brugsch Pacha, that the invasion of Egypt by the 
Libyans was accompanied, not by Greeks and the 
people of the Isles, but by Colchian tribes from the 
Caucasus, although supported by ingenious philological 
reasons, is not accepted by Ebers and others, and is not 
entertained in the work, This account of the nineteenth 
dynasty and the route of the Exodus, it has been already 
pointed out, does not correspond with the physical condi- 
tions of the country or the late surveys, but then the 
original error is due to the French engineer whose hypo- 
thesis was too hastily seized on and proved with too 
much special pleading. The history of the twenty-first 
dynasty is only imperfectly known, but here the recent 
discoveries have thrown additional light on this obscure 
period. The mummies at the Deir-el-Bahari have aided 
in the determination of the succession, and it is evident 
that these high priests were not only descended from the 
Princes of AZthiopia, who, originally appointed by the 
Pharaohs, maintained a kind of hereditary succession, 
but also belonged to the black races, the flesh of Pinotem 
II. being unusually brown, and revealing a Nigritic 
descent, there was a strange similarity with the features 
of Khuenaten, who also probably appertained to the 
same race. The hypothesis that Shishak was an 
Assyrian king or prince is not confirmed by the annals 
of Assyria nor Nimroud, whose Egyptian name Namruth 
is supposed to have the meaning in the A2thiopian dialect 
of Panther. But the name of Nimroud is not yet identi- 
fied either in the Assyrian or Babylonian, and although 
the names of Assyrian persons mentioned in Egyptian 
haye little resemblance with those given by the Assy- 
rians themselves, still ingenuity might convert Pul 
Ashar-nes into Assur-Nazir-Pal, who ruled some time 
about the period. The A®thiopian dynasty is given 
with some detail, but there is some difficulty about 
the A£thiopian Piankhi, who conquered the supposed 
NATURE - 
[Vov. 24, 1881 
Se 
dodekaroty or rulers, who presided over Egypt ac- 
cording to the Assyrian annals, and whose names 
are recorded on the historical cylinders of Assur- 
banihabla, or Assur-banipal, and enter into Egyptian 
history. The position of Piankhi is placed immediately 
before the twenty-sixth dynasty, on account of his having 
for antagonist Tefnekht or Tnephakhthus, the father of 
Bokkoris, king of the twenty-fourth line. But Piankhi’s 
name occurs amongst the kings of the twenty-first 
dynasty, and Piankhi may have been placed too low im 
the series. The A2thiopian invasion of Egypt is amply 
detailed in the Assyrian annals, but the information of 
the Egyptian monuments about Sabaco and Tirhakah is 
scanty. 
The “Egypt of the Past” may be safely commended 
to the general reader as containing in a lucid form all the 
contributions of monumental sources to Egyptian history ; 
it is not too long nor detailed, and is in a portable form. 
The plates are very well executed, especially the wood- — 
cuts ; the coloured lithographic ones are gaudy and hazy 
in the style of Turner, but as that is supposed to repre- 
sent a kind of aérial perspective of the highest order, it 
will no doubt commend itself to zsthetic minds. It is, 
however, a good work, and well got up. 
OUR BOOK SHELF 
Natural Philosophy for London University Matriculation. 
By Edward B. Aveling, D.Sc. (London: Stewart and 
Co., 1881.) 
WITH text-books innumerable devised specially for 
their use, it would be remarkable if candidates for 
the London matriculation should fail in natural philo- 
sophy. That so large a proportion should fail in this 
subject, as is the case, must be due not to the quan- 
tity, but to the quality of their sources of instruction. 
What then must be said of a teacher who takes upon 
himself to venture on the scene with an inferior and 
trashy work in which all the worst blunders of the 
exploded text-books of a past date are reproduced? 
Although the writer of the book lying before us professes 
his indebtedness to the excellent manuals of Dr. Wormell 
and Mr. Philip Magnus, and to the invaluable assistance 
of his friend Mrs. Annie Besant, he cannot be congratu- 
lated on his success in following in the tracks of his 
predecessors. His book is, in fact, a cram-book of the 
worst and weakest type. The barest minimum of the 
subject divided into the inevitable Statics and Dy- 
namics constitutes the programme; Optics and Heat 
being somehow thrown in along with Moving Bodies as 
divisions of the latter of these two branches. 
Passing over the Introduction, we arrive at the heading 
“Definition and Divisions,” where the serious business 
of teaching natural philosophy begins with the words : 
“From its earliest years a child is surrounded by a world 
of beauty and of mystery,” and the author proceeds anon 
to advance grave arguments for the conclusion “force, 
then, is the cause of motion.” After this it is not very 
surprising to read (p. 165) that as the “ phrase ‘change of 
velocity’ is cumbersome, it is replaced by the exceedingly 
important word ‘acceleration.’’’ And then, as if the 
author were not sure whether to give us too little or too 
much in his definitions, we are told in the very next sen- 
tence: “Acceleration is the change of velocity per unit of 
time that occurs in auntt of time’’ | That this is no mere 
lapsus calami is clear from the next page, where it is twice 
stated that acceleration is the ‘change of velocity per 
second ¢hat occurs in one second.” Yet the author ex- 
| pressly states that “ variable acceleration is not within our 
