254 On the Mountains on the Eastern Side of the Nile. 
the Moon will ere long acquire a more prominent place in the 
world’s history than they have hitherto occupied. The entire 
eastern side of the basin of the Nile appears to be aur iferous, 
the gold collected in various parts of it since the earliest ages 
being brought down by the tributaries of that river; so that 
there is reason to consider the Mountains of the Moon as 
a meridional metalliferous cordillera, similar in its general 
characters to the Ural and the corresponding great mountain 
ranges of America and Australia. It is from this portion of 
Africa, as I have explained in my work “The Sources of the 
Nile,”* that the “ gold of Ophir” of the Hebrew Scriptures 
was obtained. Whenever the discovery shall be made in 
Eastern Africa of some of the chief deposits of that precious 
metal, the influx from all parts of the civilised world to the 
“diggings” in the Mountains of the Moon will be such as to 
occasion 2 more rapid and complete revolution in the social 
condition of those hitherto neglected regions than could be 
caused by commerce, by missionary labours, by colonisation, 
or by conquest ; as we have witnessed in other quarters of the 
globe, where the auri sacra fames has collected together 
masses of the most daring and energetic of human beings. 
We shall then, too, doubtless see in Eastern Africa, as in 
California and in Australia, the formation of another new race 
of mankind. 
On Lightning Figures. By Cuarites Tomiinson, Lecturer 
on Science, King’s College School, London. 
In the newspaper reports of accidents from lightning, we 
occasionally meet with statements that have given rise to much 
speculation, such as that certain tree-like or ramified figures 
have sometimes been found on the bodies of men and animals 
struck by the electric fluid. In the Atheneum, No. 1535 
(28th March 1857), is given an abstract of a paper by M. 
Andres Poey, Director of the Physico-meteorological Obser- 
vatory of Havannah, entitled “The Photographic Effects of 
* Page 62; and see “ Origines Biblice,” p. 115. 
t Read before the Physical: Section of the British Association at Manchester, 
5th Sept. 1861. 
