71 
Roman, time. The blade of a copper knife, thirteen feet, is 
not of great age, and the small vase of white pottery, from a 
depth of fourteen feet, is of late, apparently of the Greek, 
period. 
Most of the “ objects of art " found near the statue of Mem- 
phis he decidedly pronounces to be of late time. To a head 
cut in greyish stone, brought up from a depth of forty feet at 
Memphis, he assigns no higher a date than the Ptolemaic 
period. In fact, he states that he saw no signs of any great 
age in any single fragment, while many were most decidedly 
of a late period, Ptolemaic or Roman. 
In this way the strictures of the Quarterly reviewer as 
to the w*orthlessness of Mr. Horner's solution of the problem 
of man's antiquity are fully borne out. Indeed, Sir Charles 
Lyell himself seems convinced of it ; for he neither gives Mr. 
Horner's rate of the secular increase of Nile mud at 3J inches 
per century, nor does he give his assumed antiquity of man at 
13,371 years. He also admits the fallacy of Mr. Horner's 
method of determining the secular rate of the accumulation of 
the Nile mud. 
u The ancient Egyptians ” (says Sir C. Lyell) “ are known to have been in 
the habit of enclosing with embankments the areas on which they erected 
temples, statues, and obelisks, so as to exclude the waters of the Nile ; and the 
point of time to be ascertained in every case where we find a monument buried 
to a certain depth in mud, as at Memphis and Heliopolis, is the era when the 
city fell into such decay that the ancient embankments were neglected and 
the river allowed to inundate the site of the temple, obelisk, or statue. Even 
if we knew the date of the abandonment of such embankments, the enclosed 
areas would not afford a favourable opportunity for ascertaining the average 
rate of deposit in the alluvial plain, for Herodotus tells us that in his time 
those spots from which the Nile waters had been shut out for centuries ap- 
peared sunk, and could be looked down into from the surrounding grounds, 
which had been raised by the gradual accumulation over them of sediment 
annually thrown down. If the waters at length should break into such de- 
pressions, they must at first carry with them into the enclosure much mud 
washed from the deep surrounding banks, so that a greater quantity would 
be deposited in a few years than perhaps in as many centuries on the great 
plain outside the depressed area, where no disturbing causes intervened.” 
It is curious that while Sir C. Lyell gives neither Mr. 
Horner's secular rate of increase of the Nile mud nor the anti- 
quity which he assigns to his fragments of brick and pottery, 
he gives M. Girard's rate of increase of 5 inches per century 
between Assouan and Cairo, although he states that Mr. 
Horner believes this determination to be founded on vague 
