67 
Bellefonds (Linant Bey), that a few years ago he made a boring about 200 
metres (656 feet) from the river on the Libyan side of the Rosetta branch of 
the Nile, in the parallel of the apex of the Delta, and that he had found 
fragments of red brick at a depth of about 72 feet below the surface of the 
ground. But in these cases there was wanting the fixed point of known age, 
the indispensable requisite for the formation of a chronometric scale. I may, 
however, state that M. de Roziere estimates the mean rate of the deposit of 
the sediment in the Delta as not exceeding 2 French inches and 3 lines 
(60*907 millemetres = 2*3622 English inches) in a century.” 
I have given you, though at the risk of being thought 
tedious, the exact words in which Mr. Horner solves his 
problem for determining the age of man in Egypt. First, 
because of the importance still attached to this problem ; 
secondly, because I can find no other attempt to solve the 
problem of man's age by means of mud-deposits approaching 
to anything like the scientific accuracy sought to be attained 
by him. We have plenty of dogmatic statements that Nile 
mud or Mississippi mud accumulates at such a mean rate per 
century, but no proof or even statement of the methods by 
which that rate is determined. 
Such a multitude of assumptions are made by Mr. Horner 
in accumulating the data for the solution of his problem that 
the most superficial consideration of it must lead us to suspect 
some great fallacy in his reasoning. Is there any real proof 
of the date of the colossal statue ? Some assert that Egypto- 
logists cannot interpret hieroglyphics, and maliciously compare 
translations of the same hieroglyphical inscription, by two 
equally eminent translators, which do not agree in a single 
word, and are most opposite to each other in sense. But 
taking for granted that the inscription is rightly read as that 
of Rameses II., what proof is there that it was erected in his 
reign ? When the future New Zealander speculates on the 
date of the statue of Richard I. now standing at Westminster, 
will he be right in assuming that it was erected in the middle 
of his reign ? 
If it be the statue spoken of by Herodotus, where is the 
colossal statue of the wife and the two colossal statues of the 
sons ? Why have these disappeared without a trace, leaving 
only that of the king ? Again, do not many distinguished 
Egyptologists differ from Lepsius in his chronology ? 
What says Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, in his Astronomy of the 
Ancients (p. 370), about the estimate of Lepsius, that Sesostris 
or Rameses Mianun reigned from about 1394 to 1328 b.c. ? — 
“ Lepsius agrees with Bunsen that Sesostris on the Manethonian list, who 
stands in the 12th dynasty at 3320 b.c., is not Sesostris, but, instead of ele- 
F 2 
