Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/53

Rh of the amount of sediment formed in a century, which they suppose not to exceed on the average five inches. When the waters subside, this thin layer of new soil, exposed to a hot sun, dries rapidly, and clouds of dust are raised by the winds. The superficial deposit, moreover, is disturbed almost everywhere by agricultural labours, and even were this not the case, the action of worms, insects, and the roots of plants would suffice to confound together the deposits of two successive years.

All the remains of organic bodies, such as land-shells, and the bones of quadrupeds, found during the excavations be longed to living species. Bones of the ox, hog, dog, dromedary, and ass were not uncommon, but no vestiges of extinct mammalia. No marine shells were anywhere detected; but this was to be expected, as the borings, though they sometimes reached as low as the level of the Mediterranean, were never carried down below it,—a circumstance much to be regretted, since where artesian perforations have been made in deltas, as in those of the Po and Granges, to the depth of several hundred feet below the sea level, it has been found, contrary to expectation, that the deposits passed through were fluviatile throughout, implying, probably, that a general subsidence of those deltas and alluvial formations has taken place. Whether there has been in like manner a sinking of the land in Egypt, we have as yet no means of proving; but Sir Gardner Wilkinson infers it from the position in the delta on the shore near Alexandria of the tombs commonly called Cleopatra's Baths, which cannot, he says, have been originally built so as to be exposed to the sea which now fills them, but must have stood on land above the level of the Mediterranean. The same author adduces, as additional signs of subsidence, some ruined towns, now half under water, in the Lake Menzaleh, and channels of ancient arms of the Nile submerged with their banks beneath the waters of that same lagoon. In some instances, the excavations made under the