Oct. 8, 1885 | 
NATURE 
565 
forty and fifty miles above P‘ing-shan Hsien—the highest point 
reached by the Upper Yangtsze Expedition in 1861. From 
Man-i-sst Mr. Hosie descended the Chin-sha Chiang and the 
Great River to Ch‘ung-ch ‘ing. 
Antarctic Discovery, by Admiral Sir Erasmus Ommanney, 
C.B., F.R.S.—The object of this paper is to draw atten- 
tion to the neglect of the Antarctic region as a field for explora- 
tion. The author gives a summary of the work which has 
already been done by Cork, Bellingshausen, Weddell, Biscoe, 
Balleny, Wilkes, Dumont d’Urville, James Ross, and Nares (in 
the Challenger). The author refers to a paper by Dr. Neumayer 
on the subject, the substance of which was reproduced in 
NATURE (vol. vii. p. 21). The author concludes as follows :— 
Ihave thus laid before you but a very imperfect description of 
these voyages ; to give the details of the scientific results would 
occupy a separate paper. But I have endeavouied to demon- 
strate how large a field remains open for discovery. I think, 
from all we now know, we may infer that the South Pole is 
capped by an eternal glacier; and, from the nature of the 
soundings obtained by Ross, it would appear that the great ice- 
wall along which the ships navigated was the termination of the 
glacier—the source from which the inexhaustible supply of ice- 
bergs and ice-islands are launched into the Southern Ocean, 
many of which drift to the low latitude of 42°. The fact of 
finding the volcanoes of equal proportions to Etna or Mont 
Blanc creates a zest for further research regarding that awful 
region on which neither man nor quadruped ever existed. No 
man has ever wintered in the Antarctic zone. The great 
desideratum now before us requires that an expedition should 
pass a winter there, in order to compare the conditions and 
phenomena with our Arctic knowledge. The observations and 
data to be collected there throughout one year could not fail to 
produce matter ‘of the :deepest importance to all branches of 
science. I believe that such an achievement can be accomplished 
in these days with ships properly designed and fitted with the 
means of steam propulsion ; nor is it chimerical to conceive a 
sledge party travelling over the glacier of Victoria Land towards 
the South Pole, after the example of Nordenskjéld in Green- 
land. Another interesting matter requires investigation, from 
the fact that all the thermometers supplied for deep-sea tempe- 
ratures to Ross were faulty in construction, as they were then 
not adapted to register accurately beneath the weighty oceanic 
pressure. Moreover, another magnetic survey is most desirable 
in order to determine what secular change has been made in the 
elements of terrestrial magnetism after an interval of forty years 
and more, when taken by Ross. In fact, there exists a wide 
field open for investigation in the unknown South Polar Sea. 
This paper will, I trust, be the prelude for others to follow in 
arousing geographers and this powerful Association in promoting 
further research by despatching another South Polar expedition, 
having for its object to secure a wintering station. No other 
nation is so capable of providing and carrying it out. Even in 
the Australian colonies there exists the spirit and the means for 
such a noble enterprise. 
Projected Restoration of the Retan Maris, and the Province, 
Lake, and Canals ascribed to the Patriarch Foseph, by Cope 
Whitehouse, M.A., F.A.G.S.—The Berlin Geographical So- 
ciety has published, in its Zeitschrift for May, 1885 (No. 116), 
the latest map of Egypt, from the Fayoum to Behnesa, and 
from the Nile to the Little Oasis. The text by Dr. Ascherson 
gives credit for a considerable area to the topographical observa- 
tions presented to this society at Montreal. So much of the 
Reian basin as lies between the Quasr Qeriin and the Quasr 
Reian has not been visited by any European except the author 
of this paper (1882, 1883). It is now an accepted fact that 
there is a depression south of the Fayoum, not less than 150 feet 
below the level of the Mediterranean, with a superficial area at 
the level of high Nile of several hundred square miles. It is 
irregular in shape, curving like a horn from a point near Behnesa 
to the ridge which separates it from the Fayoum. In the south- 
ern part are two, and perhaps three, patches of vegetation, wild 
palm-trees, and ruins of Roman and early Christian date. This 
part was visited by Belzoni, May 22, 1819; Caillaud, Novem- 
ber 24, 1819; Pacho and Miiller, 1823-24; Sir G. Wilkinson, 
1825; Mason Bey, 1870; and Ascherson, March 27, 1876. 
Dr. Ascherson determined by aneroid observations that his camp 
was 29 metres below the sea. Caillaud found ruins about 
+ 38m., or about the level of high Nile in the valley on the 
same latitude. The aneroid, theodolite, and other observations 
of March 6 and April 4, 1882, and April, 1883, by the author 
of this paper, established a depth of —175 to —180 English 
feet. The greatest depth is probably under the western cliffs 
south of the Haram Medhiret el-Berl. No previous explorer 
had conceived it possible that this might have been a lake within 
historic times. The level of the ruins, as determined by Caill- 
aud, shows that the ancient station of Ptolemais might have 
been, as represented in the text and maps of Claudius Ptolemy, 
on a horn-shaped lake about 35 miles long and 15 wide, with a 
maximum depth of 300 feet, fed by acanal, partly subterranean, 
from Behnesa, as well as by a branch of the present Bahr Jusuf 
communicating with it through the Fayoum. ‘The lower plain 
of the Fayoum had been, at that time, fully redeemed, and the 
present Lake of the Horn reduced to such insignificant dimen- 
sions as to be unnoticed. The restoration of the Reian basin of 
Lake Meeris and the drainage by evaporation of the Birket el- 
Queriin would bea repetition in modern times of the best results 
reached in the Greco-Roman period, perhaps 3000 years after 
the first effort to utilise these two unique basins for storage and 
drainage. 
On Batho-hypsographical Maps, with Special Reference to a 
Combination of the Ordnance and Admiralty Surveys, by E. G. 
Rayenstein.—The batho-hypsographical map, which exhibits 
the vertical configuration of the solid surface of the earth, above 
as well as below the ocean levels, is a product of modern times. 
It was Gerard Mercator who first inserted soundings upon a 
chart in 1585, but nearly two centuries passed away before 
Cruquins, in 1728, introduced the fathom-lines with which we 
are all familiar. Buache, and after him Ducarla, first suggested 
the introduction of contours upon maps, and their idea was 
realised in 1791 by Dupain-Triel on a map of France. The 
combination of these two descriptions of contoured maps we owe 
to modern German geographers, and more especially to Berghans, 
Von Sydow, and Ziegler. Cartographers, in effecting this com- 
bination, had hitherto quite lost sight of the fact that the heights 
on maps are referred to high or mean water, whilst the depths 
on charts represent soundings reduced to low water. This 
rough method gave satisfactory results when dealing with maps 
on a small scale, but a more rigid method would have to be 
applied when it was desired to combine accurate surveys like 
those made by the Ordnance and Admiralty Departments. The 
so-called mean level of the sea was not a suitable datum level, 
and it would be necessary to carry on tidal and other scientific 
observations on a far more comprehensive plan than had been 
done hitherto if a really satisfactory batho-hypsographical map 
of the British Islands were to become attainable. These various 
supplementary surveys, tidal observations, &c., it was to be 
hoped, would expand into a comprehensive scientific survey of 
the British seas. 
What has been done for the Geography of Scotland, and what 
remains to be done, by H. A. Webster.—After remarking on the 
unsatisfactory state of the Ordnance Maps, Mr. Webster said 
that in regard to the depth of our lakes and rivers—and the 
submerged portion of a valley is geographically as interesting 
as the sub-aérial portion—absolutely no data are supplied by the 
Ordnance Survey. Nor, with a few individual exceptions, do 
they exist in an accurate and trustworthy form anywhere else. 
It was an open secret that, when this omission was pointed out 
to the Government by the Royal Societies of London and 
Edinburgh, the Lords of the Treasury refused, and again 
refused, to authorise a bathymetric lake and river survey being 
carried out, either by the officers of the Ordnance Survey or by 
those of the Hydrographic Department. Such a refusal could 
not be permanently accepted. It was to be hoped that when 
the Government was next urged to move in the matter they 
would be asked for more, and not for less, We requird not 
only a hydrographic survey done once and for all (thovgh that 
was worth the doing) ; we required a systematic registration of 
hydrographic facts throughout the country, in order that the 
true régime both of lakes and rivers may be known in detail 
and with scientific precision. The ignorant niggardliness of the 
British Government was in striking contrast to the conduct of 
those of some foreign countries. In Switzerland, for instance, 
there was a regular system of inland hydrographic observations, 
by which the régime of all the principal rivers was annually 
recorded and rendered easily intelligible by a series of graphic 
bulletins. In regard to a Swiss river we could tell the volume 
at any period of the year at several important points, and could 
compare the facts of 1884, for instance, with those of any year 
in the last two decades. Every one knew what a vast body of 
interesting data had for generations been accumulating about 
