Notices of Memoirs—H. T. Ferrar—Some Desert Features. 459 
that the educational conflict of the future will be between academic 
science and technical science, on grounds in some respects analogous 
to those between classics ii! science during the last century. The 
advocates of the educational value of technical science are not i inspired 
by mere impatience with the apparently useless, for they accept the 
principle that the essence of education is method, not matter. There- 
fore, they claim that the methods and principles of science can be 
better taught by subjects which are being used on a large scale in 
modern industries than by subjects of which the interest is still 
purely theoretical. Those who fear that academic science will be 
neglected if technical science be used in education may be encouraged 
by the brilliant revival of classical research since classics lost its 
educational monopoly. Academic science is even less likely to be 
neglected. It will always have its fascination for those intellectual 
hermits—shall I not say those saints of science ?—who prefer to work 
for love of knowledge, free from the worrying intrusion of the mixed 
problems and fickle conditions of the industrial world; and the greater 
the progress of applied science the more urgent will be its demands 
for help from pure science, and, as a necessary consequence, the wider 
will be the appreciation and the more generous the endowment of 
scientific research. 
Technical education must be as rigorous as that in academic 
education, and its connection with the fundamental principles must be 
as intimate. When so taught, economic problems provide at least as 
good a mental training as those branches of science which are purely 
theoretical. Ifthe new Imperial College of Science and Technology 
carry on the mission for which the Geological Society was founded 
a century ago, if it inspire its students to have their delight in 
using past discoveries on the open surface of the earth, so that they 
may penetrate to what is within, then they will gain that sure know- 
ledge of the formation and distribution of ores which is of ever-growing 
national importance. 
II.—Some Desert Features.! By H. T. Ferran, M.A., F.G.S. 
ONTRAST between the deserts on either side of the Nile. The 
) Western Desert, sometimes known as the Libyan Desert, presents 
all the features which one would expect to find in a region of deficient 
rainfall. There are broad featureless plains with no very definite 
" drainage systems; there are long lines of sand-dunes stretching for 
tens of miles across the country ; there are centripetal basins, and 
there are monadknocks or inselbergen, and an almost entire absence of 
vegetation. 
The Eastern Desert, or the Etbai, on the other hand, displays an 
integrated drainage system ; sand-dunes are conspicuous by their 
absence : vegetation is not scarce; and comparatively high mountains 
form a backbone to the country. These mountains are a true chain 
and form the water-parting between the Nile and the Red Sea. This 
water-parting is very much nearer the east coast, and, as in South 
Africa, so here we have the shorter and steeper eastward draining wadis 
1 By permission of the Director-General, Survey Department, Egypt. 
