British Association. 1047 



in the form of a cone, and sufficiently well put together to insure adequate solidity. 

 The diameter of the cone at its base was estimated as nearly equal to its height, and 

 the apex, which terminated in a slight concavity, measured about two feet six inches, 

 or three feet in diameter. The materials of which the great mass was composed were 

 sticks and weeds, fragments of wreck, and the bones of fishes •, but in one was found 

 the thorax of a man, a silver watch made by George Prior, a London watchmaker of 

 the last century, celebrated throughout the East, and in the nest or basin at the apex 

 of the cone, some pieces of woollen cloth and an old shoe. That these nests had been 

 but recently constructed was sufficiently evident from the shoe and watch of the ship- 

 wrecked pilgrim, whose tattered clothes and whitened bones were found at no great 

 distance; but of what genus or species had been the architect and occupant of the 

 structure Mr. Burton could not, from his own observation, determine. From the ac- 

 counts of the Arabs, however, it was presumed that these nests had been occupied by 

 remarkably large birds of the stork kind, which had deserted the coast but a short time 

 previous to Mr. Burton's visit. To these facts," said Mr. Bonomi, " I beg to add the 

 following remarks: — Among the most ancient records of the primeval civilization of 

 the human race that have come down to us, there is described, in the language the 

 most universally intelligible, a gigantic stork, bearing, with respect to a man of ordi- 

 nary dimensions, the proportions exhibited in the drawing before you, which is faith- 

 fully copied from the original document. It is a bird of white plumage, straight and 

 large beak, long feathers in the tail ; the male bird has a tuft at the back of the head, 

 and another at the breast : its habits apparently gregarious. This very remarkable 

 painted basso-relievo is sculptured on the wall, in the tomb of an officer of the house- 

 hold of Pharaoh Shufu (the Suphis of the Greeks), a monarch of the fourth dynasty, 

 who reigned over Egypt, while yet a great part of the Delta was intersected by lakes 

 overgrown with papyrus, — while yet the smaller ramifications of the parent stream 

 were inhabited by the crocodile and hippopotamos, — while yet, as it would seem, that 

 favoured land had not been visited by calamity, nor the arts of peace disturbed by war, 

 so the sculpture in these tombs intimates, for there is neither horse nor instrument of 

 war in any one of these tombs. At that period, the period of the building of the great 

 pyramid, which, according to some writers on Egyptian matters, was in the year 2100 

 B.C., which, on good authority, is the 240th year of the Deluge, this gigantic stork 

 was an inhabitant of the Delta, or its immediate vicinity ; for, as these very interest- 

 ing documents relate, it was occasionally entrapped by the peasantry of the Delta, and 

 brought, with other wild animals, as matters of curiosity, to the great landholders or 

 farmers of the products of the Nile, — of which circumstance this painted sculpture 

 is a representation, the catching of fish and birds, which in these days occupied a large 

 portion of the inhabitants. The birds and fish were salted. That this document gives 

 no exaggerated account of the bird may be presumed from the just proportion that the 

 quadrupeds, in the same picture, bear to the men who are leading them ; and, from 

 the absence of any representation of these birds in the less ancient monuments of 

 Egypt, it may also be reasonably conjectured they disappeared soon after the period of 

 the erection of these tombs. With respect to the relation these facts bear to each 

 other, I beg to remark that the colossal nests of Capts. Cook and Flinders, and also 

 those of Mr. James Burton, were all on the sea-shore, and all of those about an equal 

 distance from the equator. But whether the Egyptian birds, as described in those 

 very ancient sculptures, bear any analogy to those recorded in the last pages of the 

 great stone book of nature (the new red sandstone formation), or whether they bear 



