Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/56

38 Another fragment of red brick was found by Linant Bey, in a boring seventy-two feet deep, being two or three feet below the level of the Mediterranean, in the parallel of the apex of the delta, 200 metres distant from the river, on the Libyan side of the Rosetta branch. M. Rosière, in the great French work on Egypt, has estimated the mean rate of deposit of sediment in the delta at two inches and three lines in a century ; were we to take two and a half inches, a work of art seventy-two feet deep must have been buried more than 30,000 years ago. But if the boring of Linant Bey was made where an arm of the river had been silted up at a time when the apex of the delta was somewhat farther south, or more distant from the sea than now, the brick in question might be comparatively very modern.

The experiments instituted by Mr. Horner, in the hope of obtaining an accurate chronometric scale for testing the age of a given thickness of Nile sediment, are not considered by experienced Egyptologists to have been satisfactory. The point sought to be determined was the exact amount of Nile mud which had accumulated in 3000 or more years, since the time when certain ancient monuments, such as the obelisk at Heliopolis, or the statue of king Ramesses at Memphis, are supposed by some antiquaries to have been erected. Could we have obtained possession of such a measure, the rate of deposition might be judged of, approximately at least, whenever similar mud was observed in other places, or below the foundations of those same monuments. But the ancient Egyptians 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