Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/372

358 Nile Valley here is bounded on each side by hills of Tertiary limestone on whose flanks the present surface-soil rests without any intervening Quaternary deposits. On the western or Libyan side these hills are pierced by many dry ravines, or wadys, through which the desert sands make their way down toward the cultivable strip of alluvial soil on the bank of the river. Though Upper Egypt is a rainless region, still occasionally, perhaps once in twenty years, heavy rains occur, and great torrents tear their way down these wadys into the Nile. In the bottom of such ravines, and occasionally on the elevated plateaus of the hills, I succeeded after long and toilsome searching in finding several implements of the true St. Acheul type. I also found innumerable examples of all the various objects that are commonly discovered in other countries, in which the existence of "the stone age" is considered to be established. These were axes, scrapers, piercers, knives, flakes, nuclei, etc., together with some forms that were entirely novel, and all without exception were made by the process of chipping. Although polished implements have been occasionally discovered in Egypt, I have never myself happened to find a single example. Some few objects were met with in the eastern desert; but on the Arabian side the valley is so much wider that it is almost impossible to reach the hills in one day and have any time left for searching. At Paris I showed the objects I had discovered to M. de Mortellet, curator of the prehistoric department of the great museum of St. Germain-en-Laye, under whose charge had been placed the organization of the anthropological department of the late French Exhibition. By him I was requested to place them there, where they were seen and examined by many scholars from various countries occupied with prehistoric studies, and by all they were pronounced to be true palæolithic objects. Quaternary deposits do not occur in the Nile Valley, so far as I am aware, though they have been found in various parts of the Sahara. Consequently it is only in such spots as those in which these implements were discovered, that any relics of the early man can now be met with there. If man lived in Egypt at that remote epoch, most traces of him must now lie buried under hundreds of feet of Nile mud, the product of the annual inundation of the river for countless ages. The discovery, therefore, in the Nile Valley of all the usual types of objects of "the stone age" in other countries, including those of the most remote times, would seem to furnish a sufficient reply to the objections of such as maintain that no traces of "the fossil man" have been discovered in Egypt.