1869-71 
HIS PAPER AT THE ‘INSTITUT’ 
203 
“ Institut” as one of the eight foreign members, 
read a paper there “ On the Geology of Egypt,” 
and so home on March 18. 
On the occasion of the Royal Geographical 
Society dinner, which was given on May 25, 1869, 
Owen, in answering the toast ‘ The Scientific and 
Literary Results of the last Nile Expedition,’ gave 
some account of his observations during his recent 
tour. He said: ‘In the grand and praiseworthy 
labours of the accomplished engineers of the Suez 
Canal I had opportunities of seeing sections of the 
Desert — deposits of unusual depth and extent. 
In parts of these were alternations of strata, thin 
beds of argillaceous deposit between thicker ones 
of silico-calcareous and gypseous materials, which 
suggested that the old ocean of that locality — for 
all the Desert is an upraised seabed — had begun 
to receive, about the close of the Miocene period, 
alluviums, or the wear by fresh water of an adja- 
cent land, and these at regularly repeated intervals. 
The phenomena and fossils suggested to me that 
the surface contour of the African continent 
might about that time have gained so much of its 
present form as to cause a watershed in the direc- 
tion indicated by the course of the present N ile. I n 
the Desert deposits of the nummulitic and creta- 
ceous periods there is no trace of this fresh water 
alternating admixture. So far as my limited 
Opportunities of observation extended, I found 
no evidence of those repeated disturbances or 
