Professor Owen's Address, 389 



some recent works. Nor can we be surprised to find that the 

 migratory instincts of the human species, with the peculiar en- 

 dowment of adaptiveness to all climates, should have produced 

 modifications in geographical distribution to which the lower 

 forms of living nature have not been subject. Ethnology is a 

 wide and fertile subject, and I should be led far beyond the limits 

 of an inaugural discourse were I to indulge in an historical sketch 

 of its progress. But I may advert to the testimony of different 

 witnesses — to the concurrence of distinct species of evidence — as 

 to the much higher antiquity of the human race, than has beeu 

 assigned to it in historical and genealogical records. 



Mr. Leonard Horner discerned the value of the phenomena of 

 the annual sedimentary deposits of the Nile in Egypt as a test 

 of the lapse of time during which that most recent and still operat- 

 ing geological dynamic had been in progress. In two Memoirs 

 communicated to the Royal Society in 1855 and 1858, the result 

 of ninety-five vertical borings through the alluvium thus formed 

 are recorded. In the excavations near the colossus of Rameses 

 II. at Memphis, there were 9 feet 4 inches of Is ile sediment be- 

 tween 8 inches below the present surface of the ground and the 

 lowest part of the platform on which the statue had stood. Sup- 

 posing the platform to have been laid in the middle of the 

 reign of that king, viz, 1361 b. c. such date added to a. 

 r>. 1854 gives 3,215 years during which the above sediment 

 was accumulated ; or a mean rate of increase of 3^ inches in a 

 century. Below the platform there were 32 feet of the total 

 depth penetrated ; but the lowest 2 feet consisted of sand, below 

 which it is possible there may be no true Nile sediment in this 

 locality, thus leaving 30 feet of the latter. If that amount has 

 been deposited at the same rate of 3^ inches in a century, it gives 

 for the lowest part deposited an age of 10,285 years before the 

 middle of the reign of Rameses II., and 13,500 years before A. d. 

 1854. The Nile sediment at the lowest depth reached is very si- 

 milar in composition to that of the present day. In the lowest 

 part of the boring sediment at the colossal statue in Memphis, at a 

 depth of 39 feet from the surface of the ground, the instrument is 

 reported to have brought up a piece of pottery. This,. therefore, 

 Mr. Horner infers to be a record of the existence of man 13,371 

 years before a. r». 1854 : — " Of man, moreover, in a state of civi- 

 lization, so far, at least, as to be able to fashion clay into vessels, 

 and to know to harden them by the action of a strong heat." 



