April 3, 1913] 



NATURE 



107 



have been brought to a fitting- conclusion by the 

 issue of this sumptuous catalogue of the royal 

 mummies in the Cairo Museum. The work forms 

 an exhaustive supplement, from the anatomical 

 side, to Sir Gaston Maspero's monograph on the 

 same subject. We meet with many old friends, 

 but there is scarcely one about which the author 

 has not something new to tell us. The earliest 

 and perhaps the most tragic of these dead kings is 

 the seventeenth dynasty Pharaoh Seqenen-Ra, 

 whose agonised hands and battered face and skull 

 bear witness to a violent death unon the field of 

 battle. We note that Prof. Elliot Smith supports 

 Maspero's view that the body was hastily mum- 

 mified on the field, not transported to Thebes and 

 subjected to partial decomposition, as Dr. Fouquet 

 would have it. Another interesting mummy, or 

 rather skeleton, is that of the heretic King 

 Akhenaten, which was found five years ago by Mr. 

 Theodore Davies in the tomb with Queen Tii's 

 furniture, and was at first supposed to be that of 

 the queen herself; we are glad to have the ana- 

 tomical evidence as to age, &c. , set forth in 

 greater detail. 



A subject of controversy on which these im- 

 portant researches throw new light concerns 

 the influence which, it has been supposed, 

 phallic ideas may have exerted on the technique 

 of embalming in Egvpt. The evidence against the 

 theories appears conclusive, and cases quoted in 

 support, such as the mummy of Rameses II., can 

 be otherwise explained (see especially p. 61). 



It is perhaps scarcely necessary to add the 

 warning that the catalogue is for the scientific, not 

 the general reader, who would find that much of 

 it reads like a detailed report of a series of post 

 mortem examinations ; some of the photographs, 

 too, though of the greatest possible value for the 

 anthropologist, are naturally rather gruesome. 

 But, as Prof. Elliot Smith justly remarks, since 

 these valuable historical "documents" have come 

 into our possession (mainly, it may be added, 

 through the depredations of ancient Egyptian 

 grave-plunderers), it is the duty of the man of 

 science to read them as fully and as carefully as 

 possible. 



(2) In his latest work, "The Formation of the 

 Alphabet," Prof. Flinders Petrie has given us 

 fresh proof of his versatility. De Rough's theory 

 of the derivation of the Phoenician alphabet from 

 the Egyptian hieratic writing of the twelfth 

 dynasty is now generally discarded, and some in- 

 genious theories have within recent years been 

 propounded in its place. Prof. Delitzsch, of 

 Berlin, for instance, has worked out for it an 

 elaborate cuneiform ancestry ; while Prof. Sayce 

 has more recently suggested a purely Semitic 

 XO. 2266, VOL. 91] 



source in Syria. Prof. Petrie holds that, instead 

 of coming into existence as a small alphabet, en- 

 larged and corrupted by later additions, its evolu- 

 tion was spread over a far greater area and longer 

 period. It had its origin in a gradually formed 

 signary, current far and wide throughout the 

 ancient world, until it was slowly contracted and 

 systematised. Thus the majority of the signs 

 Prof. Petrie would trace back to a remote 

 antiquity, no fewer than forty-four of his sixty 

 elements beginning' with pottery-marks in pre- 

 historic Egypt. We have not space to discuss this 

 very attractive theory in detail, but we would 

 suggest to the professor in quite general terms 

 the possibilities of fortuitous resemblance in cases 

 of parallelism where the lines of cultural contact 

 seem remote. L. W. King. 



PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS. 



(1) The Dynamic Foundation of Knowledge. By 

 Alexander Philip. Pp. xii + 318. (London: 

 Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., 

 1913.) Price 6s. net. 



(2) High-School Ethics. Book I. By J. 

 Howard Moore. Pp. xiv+182. (London: 

 G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1912.) Price 2s. 6d. 

 net. 



(3) The Positive Evolution of Religion: Its Moral 

 and Social Reaction. By Frederic Harrison. 

 Pp. XXT2O7. (London: William Heinemann, 

 1913.) Price 8s. 6d. net. 



(4) The Value and Destiny of the Individual. 

 The Gifford Lectures for 1912. Delivered in 

 Edinburgh University. By Dr. B. Bosanquet. 

 Pp. xxxii + 331. (London: Macmillan and 

 Co., Ltd., 1913.) Price 10s. net. 



(1) "T7NERGY is the real thing, not matter. 



J j The keynote of philosophy is change. 



Sensation is not sensation of thing changing and 

 of change ; it is simple consciousness of change. 

 Change implies power. All science is an inter- 

 pretation of appearance in terms of power, which 

 is the fundamental postulate. And our notion of 

 power arises from our awareness of our own 

 motor activity, which awareness is one of the 

 first data of experience. Causation is a deriva- 

 tive postulate arising from this same awareness 

 of self-activity; if we were passive photographic 

 plates, we could have no conception of causality. 

 We attribute potent efficacy to the things of sense 

 which resist us, on the analogy of our own 

 activity. 



Philosophic systems come and go, as did theo- 

 logical discussions in their mediasval day ; but 

 the hope of the future is in the triumph of 

 science. It offers the clue, viz., "to conceive 

 of things in terms of their organic potency." 



