12; 



NA TURE 



[June i i, 1908 



fore contemporary with the temple," though certain 

 of them contained secondary burials. The sarcophagi 

 of the Princesses Kensit and Kauit will henceforth 

 rank as important examples of the eleventh-dynasty 

 workmanship. 



The fifth chapter, by Prof. Xaville, is devoted to 

 the twelfth-dynasty monuments found in the temple 

 area, and to the worship, in the later periods of 

 Egyptian history, of King Neb-hatep-ra, the founder 

 of the temple. The most important monument of 

 the twelfth dynasty unearthed was a red granite 

 stela of Senusret III. (why do the authors retain the 

 obsolete transliteration Usertsen ?) recording a roval 

 decree to the priest of Amon and to the officials of 

 Thebes, " ordering rations of bread, and beer over and 

 above what had been given before, in order to increase 

 the offerings of his forefather Neb-hatep-ra." This 

 stela, more than one and a half metres high, has since 

 been removed to the Cairo Museum. 



In the last chapter, M. Naville deals with his dis- 

 covery of the famous Hathor Shrine containing the 

 Cow-statue, at present one of the chief objects of 

 interest in the museum at Cairo. This splendid speci- 

 men of the Egyptian sculptor's work M. Naville 

 believes dates from the reign of Thothmes III., but it 

 bears the name of his son, Amenhetep II. A fine 

 coloured reproduction of it is given in pi. i., from a 

 water-colour drawing by Mr. Reach. 



Several of the photographic plates are poorly repro- 

 duced, but a word of praise ought to be given to the 

 line drawings of Madame Naville, which, as always, 

 are excellent. 



BIOGRAPHY OF AN INVENTOR. 

 Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor's 



Life. By Francis Arthur Jones. Pp. xvi 4-375; 



with 22 illustrations. (London : Hodder and 



Stoughton, 1907.) Price 6^. net. 

 "TT is estimated," so Mr. Francis Arthur Jones 



-*■ tells us, " that if everything that has ever been 

 written and published about Edison were collected and 

 re-published in book form, it would make a library 

 of a thousand volumes — each volume containing an 

 average of a hundred thousand vi-ords." The present 

 biography is a most readable and interesting book, 

 which gives a very good insight into Edison's life in 

 the space of 375 pages. It is written for the general 

 rather than the scientific reader. It would be a 

 capital book to place in the hands of schoolbovs, and 

 if juvenile readers were to play at setting up make- 

 believe printing presses in railway trains in emulation 

 of Edison's first attempts at educating himself the 

 amusement would be a harmless and instructive one, 

 if they did not reproduce the fiasco which first put 

 the youthful inventor "down on his luck." 



This biography should do much to disillusion the im- 

 pressions which are so commonly formed about suc- 

 cessful men, that they only have to invent something 

 in order to make a fortune. It shows clearly that 

 the only road to success is through failure. His 

 career as telegraphic operator was most precarious, 

 and one of his first inventions— a vote-recording 

 NO. 2015, \OL. 78] 



machine for election purposes — was refused, really be- 

 cause it was too ingenious and perfect; in fact, it 

 could not be tampered with. His resolve never to in- 

 vent anything which was not wanted by the com- 

 nunity at large helped him greatly, but still the 

 telegraph companies would not seriously consider his 

 systems of multiplex telegraphy until he had done 

 something more. That something was to help them 

 out of difficulties when a breakdown occurred. His 

 successes in obtaining his first cheque from the Gold 

 Indicator Company^ and in securing the adoption of 

 his improvements in telegraphy, were onlv achieved 

 when he had shown his capacity of being handy man 

 in an emergency. Then the success of his inventions 

 in connection with the telephone and phonograph was 

 only bought at the cost of long and patient attempts 

 at trying first one substance and then another for the 

 transmitter of the former and the cylinder of the 

 latter. As to the continual litigation which fell on 

 Edison's shoulders in order to protect his patents, 

 Mr. F. A. Jones's information regarding the large 

 staff of solicitors employed in Edison's legal depart- 

 ment bears abundant testimony. 



In tlie later chapters we see how even success 

 brought troubles with it in the form of a crowd of 

 reporters, interviewers, cranks and faddists, and it 

 cannot be doubted that Edison's good humour and 

 readv wit, of which we have here many amusing in- 

 stances, no less than his indomitable energy and per- 

 severance, were greatly needed in order to enable hini 

 to cope with all the work that fell on his shoulders. 

 His biographer is also at considerable pains to dis- 

 Uusion the reader as to the wild and fantastic inven- 

 tions attributed by unscrupulous newspaper reporters 

 to " the wizard of Menlo Park," and to which the 

 name " Munchausen science " has been given. Un- 

 fortunately, many of these tall stories have been read 

 and widely believed in England, and no one is stronger 

 in his condemnation of such fictions than Edison 

 himself. 



It would be very desirable that a further book 

 should some day be published dealing more especially 

 with the scientific aspect of Edison's work. It would 

 undoubtedly be a diflicult task to write such a book. 

 If Edison did not study at a university in the accepted 

 meaning of the term, he certainly appears to have 

 made a university for himself in his workshops, in 

 which he was his own professor, and it cannot be 

 denied that the training he underwent under these 

 conditions was fully as efficient, and in many ways 

 better, than a course modelled on conventional lines. 

 His education was undoubtedly thoroughly scientific 

 in the best sense of the word, but it was different in 

 the matter of technicalities from that of the ordinary 

 science student. Consequently Edison nowhere figures 

 as a contributor of papers in transactions and period- 

 icals. Some evidence is given in this book that re- 

 sults published elewhere as " researches " were well 

 known to him years previously. His " notion books," 

 couched though they be in a mysterious language of 

 their own, must contain a lot of important new re- 

 sults, and it will be a pity if no steps are taken to 

 render these results accessible to scientific workers at 



