At the meeting of the Egyptian Exploration Fund on Wednesday
addresses were delivered by the President, Sir John Evans, and by Professor Flinders Petrie. Sir John Evans noted 'amongst the satisfactory features of a year marked by unexampled activity of research the return of Professor Maspero to his post as Director of the Department of Antiquities in Egypt, the excavations of Professor Flinders Petrie among the tombs of the Kings, and the forthcoming publication of the Papyri from the Fayum towns, Professor Petrie in an eloquent address dwelt on the astonishing results, in regard to the widerlperspective of human history, achieved by English explorations in Egypt. They had seen and handled the drinking bowls and furniture of the Kings of the First Dynasty this summer at Abydos,—Kings who bad been regarded as mythical, but were now as familiar and real as those of Saxon England, though the First Dynasty was older to Seti than the Exodus was to us. The grand period of the pyramid builders they now saw to be the third cycle of civilisation and art in Egypt. Professor Petrie spoke of the cordial relations that prevailed between the English explorers and Professor Maspero, and vindicated the immense superiority of the new baksheesh system of reward for results over the old system of excavating by merely driving a gang of workmen. "Everything that he had brought to light, all the history that had been unfolded, had already been cast aside as worthless in the course of recent years' works on the bad old system." It may be noted as an agreeable evidence of the spread of Egypto- logical enthusiasm in America that nearly half the aggregate income of the Fund for the past year came from the United States. A less pleasing instance of this enthusiasm in England was the sale in London by public auction during the past week of the mummy of a daughter of Rameses II. for ten guineas. One does not like to think of Macaulay's New Zealander buying the remains of Queen Elizabeth.
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