April 15, 1892.] 



SCIENCE. 



2 1 J 



they lay concealed, and their entrance had been protected 

 with iron doors. 



One of these, No. 25 on the plan, has at last been identi- 

 fied as the long looked-for hypogeum of the king. The main 

 entrance-passage, cut into the mountain to a depth of fifty 

 metres, opens into a chamber supported by four pillars. To 

 the right of this passage, another corridor, forty-five metres 

 long, branches out, opening into an unfinished chamber 

 thought to be that of the queen. Somewhat further, on the 

 same side, are three chambers, two of which are decorated 

 with paintings; and among these occurs the name of the 

 young princess Aten-Macht, the second daughter of Amen- 

 hotep IV. The decorations on the walls of the king's cham- 

 ber represent him surrounded by his family, in adoration 

 before the sun. The condition of the tomb when found 

 showed it to have been disturbed in ancient times, a fact for 

 which the circumstances of this reign furnish abundant ex- 

 planation. 



Until 1887 all that was known of Amenhotep IV. was that 

 he peacefully succeeded his great father, Amenhotep III, , 

 whose queen was a foreigner; but that having selected for 

 his only god the life and light giving sundisk " Aten," and 

 having attempted to establish his worship to the exclusion 

 of that of other gods, and particularly of that of Amon, he 

 antagonized the arrogant priesthood, whose growing power 

 was already then a force that the Pharaohs must count with. 

 In consequence of this, he found it expedient to leave Thebes 

 and to reoQove his court and the seat of government to mid- 

 dle Egypt, where, at some seventy-five kilometres south of 

 Minieh, he founded the new city, " Khu-n-aten," I.e., 

 Splendor of the Disk, the site of which is now known as 

 Tel-el- Amarna. 



Consistent in his unconpromising hatred of Amon and his 

 priests, he changed his own name in which that of the now 

 discarded god of his fathers entered as an element, and was 

 henceforth called "Khu-n-aten." 



He seems to have been a devoted husband and father, 

 and the worship he introduced — and which, after all, was 

 but a return to ancient sun-worship, and therefore more of a 

 reform than an innovation — seems to have been a lofty one, 

 if one may judge from the aspirations kindled by it in the 

 souls of its worshippers, as expressed in the beautiful hymns' 

 that have come down to us. 



Khu-n-aten left only daughters. At his death his sons-in- 

 law, who succeeded him, had not the strength to continue 

 the struggle; they gradually abandoned his faith to return 

 to the old popular worship, and the eighteenth dynasty 

 closed with a period of disturbance, indicated by the shortness 

 of the reigns. 



Was Khu-n-ated only a religious reformer, a mere fanati- 

 cal monotheist, who, as has so often been stated, was urged 

 by a devout foreign mother to break with the traditions of 

 his father's race, and whose blind intolerance tried to enforce 

 his own views upon his people ? or was he a shrewd, far- 

 sighted prince, who, perceiving the danger to the royal 

 power lurking behind the increasing pretentions of the 

 Theban priesthood, sought to put a check upon their encroach- 

 ments and to insure the independence of the crown by re- 

 moving the court and by surrounding himself with foreign- 

 ers, thus defying this formidable casle 1 



The latter view receives support from the fact that it is 

 against Amon alone that the king's animosity was practically 

 directed, and that, whilst the worship of the disk was the 

 official religion of the capital, the names of the other divini- 

 ties of Egypt remained undisturbed upon the monuments 



of his reign, and Amon's name alone was everywhere 

 erased. 



In 1887 the discovery of the archives of Khu-n-aten, con- 

 sisting of some three hundred cuneiform tablets, containing 

 important correspondence between Egypt and its Asiatic 

 allies and tributaries, as well as official reports from royal 

 lieutenants in foreign lands, threw a most unexpected light 

 upon the condition of the ancient civilized world in the fif- 

 teenth century B.C. Among the many interesting glimpses 

 thus obtained is a mention of Canaan in pre-Exodus times, 

 found in a letter from the tributary king of Jerusalem,^ 

 which reveals the existence of that city at that remote 

 period. 



The fact that the correspondence between Asia and Egypt 

 was conducted in the Neo-Babylonian characters was alone 

 sufficiently extraordinary to draw the attention of the learned 

 world to Tel-el Amarna and to the remarkable figure of the- 

 man who, in his day, filled not only that spot, but no doubt 

 the whole civilized world, with his strong personality. There 

 are many peculiarities connected with the monuments of his 

 reign and with the art they betray that have never yet been 

 quite satisfactorily explained ; and despite all that has been 

 written, and the ingenious theories that have been advanced 

 on the subject, there still remains enough that is hypotheti- 

 cal to make any monumental discovery connected with this 

 period of the greatest interest to scholars. 



S. Y. Stevenson. 



A SIMPLE APPARATUS FOR THE PRODUCTION OF 

 LISSAJOU'S CURVES. 



The requisites are a piece of thin glass tube or rod, a gas 

 flame, and a slight knowledge of elementary glass working. 

 The apparatus consists of a short piece of rod or tube which 

 serves as a base or handle, to which is fused a glass thread 

 ten or fifteen centimetres long and from one-half to one milli- 

 metre thick, carrying at its extremity a second and much 

 thinner thread of about the same length, whose free end is 

 fused into a small clear bead. Both threads are in the same 

 line with the handle, and the whole forms a compound rod. 



In constructing this rod, tw(j glass threads of the kind 

 already indicated are selected rather longer than required. 

 They are fused together, and the connection sti-aightened by 

 a gentle pull while still soft. The double rod is then held 

 near its centre, and the finer thread shortened until in vibra- 

 tion it appears, by persistance of the visual impression, as a 

 sheet or cone. The thicker thread is next adjusted in the 

 same way until the vibration of this double rod, when held 

 by its thicker end, is sufficiently rapid. This thicker end is 

 now attached to a larger piece of glass (the handle), and a 

 very small bead formed at the other end. The exact position 

 and weight of the bead required to form any given set of 

 curves must be found by trial. 



Now, holding the bead in a strong light, stand nearly- 

 facing the light, but so as to see the bead with a dark back- 

 ground, and tap the handle lightly with the fingertips. If 

 the adjustment is perfect, the bead will appear transformed 

 into a shining curve, oscillating or rolling and twisting upon 

 itself with inimitable grace like a living thing, and dying 

 away with the decreasing amplitude of the vibrations. 



These curves are represented approximately by the equa- 

 tions : — ■ 



x = a cos m d 

 y^b sin {n 6 -\- a), 

 where a and b are the amplitudes, a is the phase-difi^erence, 

 and the ratio m:n is a function of the time. When the 



