110 
NATURE 
[Mov. 25, 1869 
secretaries and other members of the committee, a sum 
of £1,500 has been subscribed: much more, however, 
will be required in order to carry out the wishes of the 
promoters of the “ Sharpey Memorial” scheme. 
Having held his present professorship since 1836, Dr. 
Sharpey is well known to, and as thoroughly esteemed 
by, a very large number of old students, who have not only 
experienced the benefit of his clear, logical, and thorough 
method of teaching, but have felt the genial influence of 
his kindly sympathy, and the value of that breadth and 
soundness of judgment for which he is soremarkable. The 
large majority of his old and present students will now 
doubtless be delighted to take part in a movement des- 
tined to do honour to their favourite professor ; and we 
believe that many of those who have been associated with 
Dr. Sharpey in his various official capacities in connection 
with science and education will also gladly avail them- 
selves of this opportunity of testifying to their high appre- 
ciation of the valuable services which he has performed in 
both these capacities, and also of bearing witness to the 
strong feelings of personal regard with which he has 
inspired them. 
The proposed memorial is of a nature likely to be 
peculiarly gratifying to Dr. Sharpey. The future “ Sharpey 
Physiological Scholar” is destined to work in the Physio- 
logical Laboratory of the College, in the practical depart- 
ments of the science ; and successive students who may 
obtain this honourable distinction will, it is hoped, come 
for some time under the immediate supervision of Dr. 
Sharpey himself. The Professor has most liberally offered 
to present to the College his anatomical and physiological 
library, consisting of the best works of the older anatomists, 
a useful series of foreign scientific periodicals, and a large 
number of monographs by some of the most active and 
learned observers of modern times. It is proposed to 
place these books in a new class-room for practical physi- 
ology, which is about to be fitted up under the name of 
the “Sharpey Physiological Laboratory and Library ;” 
and which, as part of the memorial, is to be adorned by a 
portrait of the man to whom the subscribers wish to do 
honour now, and whose memory they desire to perpetuate 
in the future. Ifthe amount of the “‘ Memorial Fund” is 
sufficient, it is also proposed that a bust of Dr. Sharpey 
should be executed for presentation to the College. The 
plan seems an excellent one, combining as it does the feature 
of being a thorough personal tribute of the most gratifying 
nature to Dr. Sharpey, destined to convey to successive 
generations of students a notion of the high estimation 
in which his services in the cause of science and educa- 
tion were regarded by his contemporaries, whilst it is also 
a movement likely to result in the further extension of 
that branch of science to which he has himself principally 
contributed. It is hoped that the study of practical 
physiology will thus be helped on more than it has 
hitherto been in this country, and that in time a school of 
practical physiology—the precursor of many others—may 
be established, equal to any of the now celebrated conti- 
nental schools. It is expected that many of the fellows of 
the Royal Society and of other scientific bodies will gladly 
take this opportunity of doing honour to a man whom they 
all esteem so highly, and for whom so many entertain 
warm feelings of personal regard. We are glad to find 
that several of the foremost amongst them have already 
given evidences of substantial co-operation, and we trust 
that many others will follow their example. 
THE ISTHMIAN WAY TO INDIA 
qe HE Canal has been opened. The flotilla, with its 
noble, royal, imperial, and scientific freight, has 
progressed along the new-made way from sea to sea. 
From Port Said, that new town between the sea and the 
wilderness, with its ten thousand inhabitants, and acres of 
workshops and building-yards, and busy steam-engines, 
the naval train floated through sandy wastes, across lakes 
of sludge and lakes of water filled from the Salt Sea; past 
levels where a few palm-trees adorn the scorched land- 
scape ; past hill-slopes on which the tamarisk waves its 
thready arms ; past swamps where flocks of flamingoes, 
pelicans, and spoonbills, disturbed by the unwonted spec- 
tacle, sent up discordant cries ; through deep excavations 
of hard sand or rock; across the low flat of the Suez 
lagoons, where Biblical topographers have searched for 
the track of the children of Israel; and so to the “red” 
waters of the great Gulf of Arabia. The flotilla has done 
its work: the Canal has been opened ; and the distance 
by water to India is now 8,000 miles, instead of the 15,000 
miles by the old route round the Cape of Good Hope. 
It is a great achievement. So great, that we need not 
wonder that the capital of 8,000,000/. sterling with which 
it was commenced in 1859 was all expended, and as much 
more required, before the work was half accomplished. 
And perhaps we ought not to be too much overcome with 
pity for the 20,000 unlucky Egyptians—natives of the 
house of bondage—pressed every month up to the year 
1863 by their paternal Government to labour, wherever 
required, along the line of excavations. How persistent 
are Oriental customs! Here we have in modern days— 
the days of power-looms, of steam printing-presses, and 
under-sea telegraphs—a touch of the old tyranny, the 
taskmasters and the groanings, associated in our memo- 
ries with the very earliest of Egyptian history. 
The length of the Canal is one hundred miles, and the 
depth, as the French engineers inform us, is to be every- 
where twenty-eight feet, so as to admit of the passage of 
large vessels. It must not be supposed that an excavation 
of the depth above mentioned has been dug all across the 
Isthmus, for the level of the country is, for the most part, 
below that of the Mediterranean ; consequently, miles of 
banks have been thrown up across the lowest tracts to 
form a channel for the water. In looking at a section of 
the whole route from Said to Suez—seventy-five miles in 
a direct line from sea to sea—the great extent of depres- 
sion is well seen. In Lake Timsah it is about eighteen 
feet ; in the Bitter Lakes, which stretch to a length of 
twenty-five miles, it is in places twenty-six feet. On 
the other hand, the elevations, though comparatively few, 
are somewhat formidable of aspect, particularly at El 
Guier and at Chalouf. The more this section is studied, 
the more forcible becomes the impression on the mind 
that a strait thickly studded with islands, as Behring’s 
Strait, once separated Asia and Africa, and that by the 
drift from the Nile and the desert the sea has been filled 
up around the islands, with the exception of the lake 
depressions, until the present Isthmus was formed. 
Hence the difference of soil. The islands rising boldly 
up: El Guier, ten miles long, layers of sand and hard 
clay ; Serapeum, three miles long, a kind of shelly lime- 
stone ; and Chalouf, six miles long, composed of hard 
clay, sandstone rock, and conglomerate, the severest part 
of the excavation. Geologists have remarked upon the 
fact that the fossils found in the Chalouf ridge are identical 
with those of the London basin and the hill of Mont- 
martre, whereby we learn that parts of Egypt, France, 
and England are of the same age. 
The mountains of Abyssinia are every year diminished 
in size and height by the enormous periodical rains which 
wash down millions of cubic feet of mud and clay into the 
Nile. Vast clouds of sand are blown into the great river 
in its long course through the deserts; and these 
transported matters, caught by the strong current setting 
in from the Straits of Gibraltar, have been drifted to the 
eastward during immemorial ages, with consequences 
which are well known to those who have studied the 
geography and geology of the Isthmus. Such a trans- 
formation will be recognised as one of the ordinary 
operations of nature, when we remember that in 4,150 
years the valley of the Nile has been raised eleven feet by 
