96 report — 1859. 



lie, some of them, in the close vicinity and direct line of the Aberdour breccia, 

 Through the agency of springs, which are copious and numerous in the district, 

 and by many other causes, the shelly materials of the raised beaches may be brought 

 in contact with the petrifying incrustations, mixed up with the land-shells and 

 mollusks of the day, which are sufficiently abundant around ; and, when removed to 

 a distance from the combined formative processes on the spot, whatrooni is here 

 for specidations and hypotheses to puzzle and confound the curious inquirer into the 

 history of the aggregated mass ! The old, the new, and the living are all in juxta- 

 position — all ready to be confounded in a matrix of yesterday. 



He next quoted the case of a cannon-ball — a thirty-two pounder — lately pre- 

 sented to him by a fellow townsman, deeply incrusted with ferruginous mud, and 

 completely indurated, which was raised on an anchor in the harbour of Copen- 

 hagen ; and, he doubted not, an identical bullet of our naval attack of fifty years 

 ago. The flints of Amiens and Abbeville, the remains in the caverns of Torquay, 

 and those in Sicily, the flint weapons in veined limestone in Cantire, and the arrow- 

 heads with elephant remains in Suffolk, were then successively brought under 

 review in the paper, — the solution of all these given by the author being that, from 

 the action of petrifying springs, the subsidence of tracts of country, the falling in of 

 tbe roofs of caverns, the undermining of cliffs and headlands, the superficial soil is 

 incrusted or buried beneath the strata on which it was originally superimposed. 



The case of the Nile piece of pottery, brought before the meeting at Leeds last 

 year by Mr. Home, was next adverted to. The answer to the assumption of its 

 vast antiquity is found in the fact, that the track of the Nile through the whole of 

 its course in Lower Egypt, has been subject to such successive mutations of level 

 as to render all comparisons between the present and the past of the yearly incre- 

 ment and amount of silt deposits over the bed of the river utterly useless. It is 

 clearly established that, in the course of the last 3000 years, the land around Suez 

 has risen 8 or 10 feet ; and it is no less warrantably established, that the whole 

 Lower Delta and the entire shores east and west of Cairo and Alexandria have been 

 repeatedly subjected to such depressions and upheavals as to dry up lakes, and to 

 change the channel of the Nile itself. Four thousand years ago, up to the borders 

 of the Theban provinces, 200 miles inland, was an estuary or marsh, where the 

 gradients and speed of the river would be directly affected by the rise or fall of 

 the basin to the northward, the existing delta, from Cairo south, becoming ulti- 

 mately dry land, or marsh, or lake. When the Egyptian monarchy was founded 

 by Menes about 4000 years from the present time, the land of Egypt, from the 

 Theban province northward, was a marsh, and from the Lake Mceris, 150 miles 

 southward, all from the sea-coast at Alexandria was permanently \inder water. 

 Eastward on the Red Sea shore, and across the Isthmus from Suez westivard to the 

 Mediterranean, is a raised beach of shells, corals, and gravel, the corals consisting 

 exclusively of varieties now in existence. The bed of the Nile within the past 4000 

 years has therefore sunk repeatedly and risen again ; and Dr. Lepsius mentions a 

 series of monuments at Senneh in Nubia, which record the highest points reached 

 by the inundations, fifteen of which are still available for reference, the height of 

 them proving that the Nile rose at that period 25 feet higher than in modern times. 



The position, then, of these and other registers and proofs referred to, completely 

 establishes the theory of a succession of upheavals and depressions, and destroys all 

 confidence in any assumed rate of increase in the mud deposits betwixt the present 

 and the past. The flow of the river is modified by the position of its line of de- 

 bouchure, and this again is dependent on the relation, for the time, betwixt the 

 levels of the land and sea ; and, finally, it follows that the Memphian monument of 

 king Eameses stands on a foundation of silt to which no possible date can be 

 assigned, whether of longer or shorter calculation. 



He saw no evidence, in short, deducible from the superficial drifts to warrant a 

 departure from the usually accepted date of man's very recent introduction upon 

 the earth. We have more positive evidence that his first appearance was character- 

 ized by many proofs of high intellectual condition which our sacred beliefs attach 

 to his origin, and that he was not primarily the ignoble creature that arrow-heads 

 and flint-knives, and ossiferous caverns would so lamentably indicate. The mighty 

 ruins spread over the plains and great river water-sheds of the East clearly indicate 

 his Oriental cradle-land, when, in conjunction with the traditions of all nations in 



