April 29, 1892.] 



SCIENCE. 



247 



practicability. He was no fanatic, but rather a higb-bred 

 theorist aad reformer" How vividly clear do such facts as 

 these make the remote past appear; and what deep meaning 

 they lend to the words of that greatest of word-painters, 

 Ernest Renan: "A giant even placed on the confines of a 

 picture still remains a giant.'' 



The palace has been exhumed and the pavements — beauti- 

 fully frescoed with tanks and fishes, birds and lotus plants, 

 and almost unique in their style — have come to light; also 

 inlaid walls and splendid columns inscribed with scenes and 

 capped wilh capitals imitating "gigantic jewelry." Their 

 surface was encrusted with brilliant glazes, and the ridges 

 between these were gilt, so that they resembled gems set in 

 gold, the effect thus produced reminding the explorers of the 

 '■ net- work " of the " Temple of Solomon." 



Mr. Petrie was also fortunate enough to come across smaller 

 objects, which have thrown light upon the history of the 

 period. In a neighboring quarry he found the name of Queen 

 Thii, the mother of Khu-n-aten, unaccompanied by that of a 

 king. This fact has given him good ground for the suggestion 

 that she may have governed alone during the minority of her 

 son, who, to all appearances, was only married in the fifth 

 year of his reign, his first child having been born in his sixth 

 year. In the fifth year of his reign the king was still called 

 Amenhotep, as shown in a papyrus found at Gurob, but in 

 his sixth year he appears at Tel-el-amarna as Khu-n-aten ; so 

 that the great schism which led to the final rupture between 

 himself and the Theban priesthood must have occurred be- 

 tween those two dates. 



Moreover, Mr. Petrie has in his possession a scarab on 

 which Amenhotep is represented in adoration before Aten, 

 the name of Amen having been subsequently erased. This 

 scarab finally settles the question, so often raised, of the 

 identity of the man who bore both names. 



Relics of the successors of Khu-n-aten — Ra-Saa-Ka-Khepru, 

 Tut-Ankh-Amen, Ai — were also recovered at Tel-el-amarna, 

 showing them to have resided there after him ; and even 

 Hor-em-heb left a block of sculpture inscribed with his 

 "cartouche" in the temple of Aten, probably in the early 

 part of his reign and before his compromise with the con- 

 servative Theban party. After that time the site was ap- 

 parently abandoned and no traces remain of further occu- 

 pation. 



The cuneiform tablets discovered in 1887 were all in store- 

 rooms outside the palace, near the house of the Babylonian 

 scribe, which Mr. Petrie identified by finding the " waste 

 pieces of his spoilt tablets in rubbish holes." 



A large quantity of jEgean pottery similar to the Mykenas 

 and lalysos type was found, of even greater variety of form 

 than that recovered at Gurob. And this as well as the natu- 

 ralistic character of the frescoes, which Mr. Petrie compares 

 with those of Tiryns and with the gold cups of Vaphio, and 

 the geometrical patterns that decorate some of the columns, 

 which in his opinion closely approach the art of the Mykenae 

 period, are highly suggestive of Greek intercourse and in- 

 fluence. 



The court of Khu-n-aten, in the fifteenth century B.C., 

 must have been a remarkable one. Under the quickening 

 influence of a great mind the foreign conquests of the war- 

 like monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty seem to have been 

 made to yield the richest fruits of peace. A wide-spread in- 

 tercourse had been established among nations; Phoenicians, 

 Syrians and Mesopotamians, Greeks and Mediterranean 

 Islanders are revealed to us as having come into the Nile 

 valley, bringing along with their commerce their arts, their 



industries, and various indirect influences. No wonder that 

 the priests of Amon saw with dread and aversion the influx 

 of foreigners who, encouraged by the evident cosmopolitanism 

 of their king, bid fair to revolutionize the ancient traditions 

 of their venerable land and to remove the narrow boundaries 

 of Egyptian conservatism. S. T. Stevenson. 



THE ROLLING OF SHIPS.' 



One fact that often strikes the thoughtful traveller by sea 

 is that, notwithstanding the great and numerous improve- 

 ments of recent years which have made life on shipboard 

 pleasant and luxurious, little or nothing has been done to 

 steady a vessel when she meets with waves that set her roll- 

 ing heavily from side to side. The tendency seems to be 

 rather in the direction of increased than of diminished rolling ; 

 for the steadying influence of sails, which makes the motion 

 so easy and agreeable in a sailing ship, is fast disappearing 

 in large steamers. Masts and sails add appreciably to the 

 resistance of large fast steamers; so they have been cut down 

 in size year by year till such fragments of sail as still remain 

 are so small compared with the size of the ship as to retain 

 little power to reduce rolling. 



Shipowners and seamen do not show much sympathy with 

 the discomfort and misery that rolling causes to most pas- 

 sengers. They perhaps get anxious about an occasional ves- 

 sel that acquires the evil reputation of being a bad roller,, 

 because passengers may be frightened away and the re- 

 ceipts fall oft' in consequence; but beyond wishing, or at- 

 tempting, to deal with abnormal cases, nothing seems to be 

 thought of. Rolling is considered incurable, or as not of 

 sufficient importance to trouble about. Yet there is nothing- 

 which would contribute so directly to the comfort of lands- 

 men at sea, or do so much to change what is for many misery 

 and torture into comfort, as to check and reduce as far as 

 possible the rolling proclivities of ships. 



The laws which govern rolling are now well understood, 

 and it is strange that this knowledge has not enabled an 

 effective means of control to be devised. What is stranger 

 still is that well-known means of mitigating rolling — such 

 as the use of bilge keels — are employed in but very few 

 cases. A ship rolls about a longitudinal axis which is ap- 

 proximately at her centre of gravity, and the rolling is 

 practically isochronous at moderate angles in ordinary ships. 

 The heaviest rolling occurs when the wave-period synchro- 

 nizes with the natural period of oscillation of the ship. 

 Many vessels are comparatively free from rolling till they 

 meet waves of this period, and if such meeting could be 

 avoided, excessive rolling could be prevented. Some vessels 

 have periods as long as fifteen to eighteen seconds for the 

 double oscillation, and as these would require to meet with 

 waves 1,300 to 1,500 feet in length, in order to furnish the 

 conditions of synchronism, it is seldom that they suffer from 

 heavy or cumulative rolling. Such waves are, however, not 

 rare in the Atlantic. 



The limits of heavy rolling are fixed, of course, by the re- 

 sistance offered by the water and air to the transverse rota- 

 tion of the ship, which is very great because of the large 

 areas that directly oppose motion in a transverse direction. 

 But for this resistance, and the condition that rolling is only 

 isochronous within moderate angles of inclination, a few 

 waves of the same period as that of a ship would capsize- 

 her. 



1 From Nature. 



