his name, the very word for iron of which I have just been speaking. Until three years ago his name was known only from Manetho and Eratosthenes, in both of whose lists of Pharaohs it appears in a more or less corrupted form. The scutcheon of the king did not appear on the Tablet of Karnak, nor on the old Tablet of Abydos, nor had it been detected on any isolated monument. But at the close of 1864 two new Pharaonic Tablets, or monumental series of the kings of Egypt, were published for the first time. One of them had been discovered by Mariette Bey at Saquara, which occupies a part of the site of ancient Memphis, and the other, already referred to under the name of the New Tablet of Abydos, was found by Herr Dümmichen, a young German Egyptologist. On the Tablet of Saquara, or Memphis, which like the Old Tablet of Abydos, belongs to the reign of Ramses the Great, say about the thirteenth century before the Christian era, our iron king is actually the first of the fifty-six ancestors of Sesostris, whom this Tablet originally comprised, and nearly all of whose scutcheons are still very well preserved. In the New Abydos Tablet he stands sixth, one king being omitted in the interval, as we learn from the 'invaluable Hieratic Canon of the Pharaohs preserved in the Turin Museum, in which priceless document the discovery of the New Tablets at once enabled Egyptologists easily to spell out the name, which had previously been undecipherable. In all the three hieroglyphical records the name reads distinctly "Lover of Iron," of course meaning "Lover of the Sword," thus attesting, not only the extreme antiquity of the use of iron, but unfortunately also of that most dreadful evil of all which are the scourges of humanity-war.

I ought to mention that Eratosthenes is wont in his list of Pharaohs to add a Greek rendering of the Egyptian names, and that my learned friend Professor Lauth, of Münich, at a time when only the fact of the discovery of the tablet of Saquara was known, besides the circumstance that it began with this Eratosthenic name, but several months before he had seen either of the new tablets, had already emended the senseless translation of the name, which in the present corrupt text reads perepos, into piλoonpos or "Lover of the Sword." He had also predicted, and written down his prediction in my note-book, when I had the happiness of spending the summer in his society at Paris, in 1864, the form which the hieroglyphical name, when published, would assume. That prediction has been exactly verified. I mention the circumstance with the view of imparting some measure

of the confidence which I myself feel, that a far from unimportant fact in the history of human civilization has really been elicited from this interesting hieroglyphical scutcheon.

I am further indebted to Mr. Pengelly for the interesting facts, that Sir Charles Lyell has already thrown out the suggestion, that the first iron wrought by man must have been meteoric, and that Sir John Lubbock has proved that the iron implements found in the hands of the aborigines of America upon the discovery of that continent were actually made of the same extra-terrene but cosmical matter. The Egyptian metallurgical history seems to warrant the conclusion that on the old continent as well, the use of iron in the arts of life had a similar origin, and thus remarkably to verify the profound à priori speculation of the father of English geology.

As to the date of Menes, and consequently of king "Mibampes," or "The Lover of Iron," or "of the Sword," living Egyptologists of eminence differ about it to the extent of more than two thousand years. Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, by an ingenious application of the year-day theory of that redoubtable Senior Wrangler of the "Little Horn," Dr. Cumming, to the solution of the great problems of Egyptian Chronology, and by the purely gratuitous assumption of the contemporaneousness of the dynasties, to the number of half-a-dozen rival royal houses at a time, whenever the exigences of the case so require, contrives to lower the proto-monarch to B.C. 2717. What the great Egyptologists of the continent think of his system, which in this country is being propagated in such works as the Encyclopædia Brittanica, it is provokingly impossible to ascertain, for they simply refuse to discuss it. On its first promulgation in 1850, Vicomte de Rougé, of the French Institute, in a note to a Memoire read before the Academy of Inscriptions, merely says, "Mr. Poole is of the number of those young students who deserve to have the whole truth told them. Either he has not read what recent archæologists have written on his subject, which would be inexcusable, or he has read them and refrains from citing them, which would be a still graver error. I have not once read in his book the name of Lepsius, à propos of all the questions treated so fully in that savant's Introduction to Egyptian Chronology." Professor Lauth, a man not only endowed with the subtlest intellect I ever knew, but also one of the most candid, as well as profoundly learned of critics, asks in the introduction to his masterly work on Manetho and the Turin Canon of the Pharaohs, published in 1865-"What scintilla of good can be got from such

works as Poole's Hora Egyptiaca, or Lesueur's Chronologie des Rois de l'Egypte? Whilst Mr. Poole's is the lowest date for Menes, that of this unhappy Lesueur, whose work is certainly the most trashy I was ever doomed for my sins to read, is, I believe, the highest arrived at by any contemporary Egyptologist. It is B.C. 5773. Between the extremes there are any number of solutions of the same enigma, and of course I have my own, which however, as I cannot here give my reasons, it would be nugatory to mention. It will have been gathered already that I am no advocate of the short date, and that I do not take fright at the apparition of a mummied record of human strivings and achievements, and of God's dealings with our race, whose annals are measured by millenniums instead of the centuries of such "ancient history" as we have hitherto known. But if I hold myself excused, in the face of the appalling discrepancy of learned opinion just adverted to, from any attempt, at least on the present occasion, to ascertain the true place of the "Iron King" in the chronological scale of history, I hope I have at least shown, that if at present unknown, it all the more deserves to be known.

ON

THE CONDITION OF SOME OF THE BONES FOUND IN KENT'S CAVERN, NEAR TORQUAY,

DEVONSHIRE.

BY W. PENGELLY, F.R.S., F.G.S., ETC.

IN the present brief communication I purpose confining myself to the long or marrow bones which are met with in Kent's Cavern.

Omitting mere splinters, they occur in four different states or conditions:-Entire, Crushed, Fractured, and Split.

I. Occasionally bones present themselves which appear to have nothing to tell us further than of what animals they formed parts. They are unbroken, ungnawed, unrolled. Clean tablets on which no history has ever been inscribed. Others, and a much greater number, are more or less scored with teeth marks; or abraded, as if from travel; or discoloured, as if from exposure; yet have no essential part missing, and are readily identified. These two groups constitute the first class -the "Entire Bones."

II. Blocks of limestone, which, from time to time, have fallen from the roof of the Cavern, and which vary from a few pounds to fully one hundred tons in weight, are met with at all depths or levels in the Cave-earth. Bones found immediately beneath them are crushed, in almost every instance, but have all their severed parts lying in contact, and sometimes cemented together. These are the second class-the "Crushed Bones," and they give us the following information:

1st. That they were crushed by the fall of the blocks found on them.

2nd. That the place occupied by each bone was the upper surface of the deposit when the block fell.

3rd. That the deposit, instead of being in a pulpy condition through which heavy objects could sink, as Dr. Mantell and others aver, was firm, unyielding, and capable of offering a resistance to a heavy falling body.

4th. That the deposit, or Cave-earth, was not all introduced into the Cavern at one and the same time,-that portion beneath each such bone having been carried in before, and that above it after, the fall of the crushing block.

III. The third class consists of those bones which have been broken with an oblique irregular fracture, highly inclined to their longitudinal axes. The severed portions do not occur together, nor is there any reason to suppose they are ever all found. Such bones, to which we shall shortly return, closely resemble the larger remnants left by the bone-eating manimals.

IV. The fourth class, to which I chiefly wish to call attention, consists of bones which have been split longitudinally with a fracture more or less clean. The different parts of the same boue are not found lying together, and there is no reason to suppose that all of them are ever recovered.

In a communication made at the last meeting of the Association, I stated that the division of these bones was "without doubt the work of man, for besides him no animal was capable of so splitting them."* My present aim is to enter, more or less fully, into the facts which lead me to the opinion to which I have committed myself,-the reasons, in short, which induce me to regard "Split Bones" as evidence of the presence of man.

The subject naturally resolves itself into three questions:1st. Were the carnivorous animals of the Cave period capable of splitting marrow bones?

2nd. Were the bones split by desiccation, or by such expansions and contractions as they would undergo when exposed to changes of temperature ?

3rd. Was man, with no other tools than such as he may be supposed to have had during the Palaeolithic period, capable of so dividing them?

The only reply which can be obtained to the first question * Transactions of the Devonshire Association, vol. ii., part i., page 33. 1867.