December gth, 1920.] Proceedings. ix. 



a ' hammer.' From one of these he would strike off a flake 

 as needed, for cutting meat or skinning, and throw it away 

 when he had finished with it. 



In addition to scrapers, knives, flakes, etc., hammer stones, 

 stones for grinding and for crushing food materials were 

 shown. The grinding stones are held in the hands and worked 

 backwards and forwards upon a larger stone slab in grinding 

 such small seeds as those of Eucalyptus microtheca (the 

 dominant tree by water-courses) or Portulaca sp. Crushing or 

 pounding stones are used in breaking the hard ' beans ' of 

 ' nardoo ' (sporocarps of Marsilea sp.). These, it is said, are 

 not used as food except in time of scarcity. 



Professor A. V. Hill, M.A., Sc.D., F.R.S., read a paper 

 entitled " The Purpose of Physiology." 



Reared as the handmaid of medicine, physiology has now 

 taken in addition a position for itself as a pure and as an 

 applied science. As the handmaid of medicine, the task of 

 physiology lies in the discovery and statement of the "normal" 

 as distinguished from the " abnormal." As a pure science it 

 is privileged to explore the mechanisms underlying the pheno- 

 mena of life by any and every means provided by scientific 

 progress. As an applied science, in co-operation with psy- 

 chology, it deals with such questions as the conditions of 

 maintenance of the " normal," the standards of fitness, mental, 

 moral and physical, which it is possible to attain or desirable 

 to aim at in the various classes of the population, and at the 

 biological factors in the economic or social system. Progress 

 in physiological knowledge may be expected in the regions 

 where physiology verges on the other, and especially on the 

 exact sciences, while the stimulus to the applications of phy- 

 siology appears on the borders of such subjects as medicine, 

 sport and physical training, industrial fatigue and conditions 

 of work, sociology or economics. 



Joint Meeting of the Society with the Manchester Egyptian 

 and Oriential Society, December gth, 1920. 

 Mr. R. L. Taylor, F.C.S., F.I.C. (Vice-President), in the Chair. 



Professor T. Eric Plet, M.A. (President of the Manchester 

 Egyptian and Oriental Society), read a paper entitled "Ancient 

 Egyptian Mathematics." 



Egyptian mathematics is not a speculative science but purely 

 practical in scope, and is chiefly known to us from the Rhind 

 papyrus in the British Museum, a document written in the 

 reign of a Hyksos King Apepi, but stated by its scribe to be a 



