The mutilations and diseases that come to light are remarkable. One man had lost his left leg below the knee; another had his hand cut off and put in the tomb; others seem to have had bones excised, and placed separately with the body. In one case acute and chronic inflammation and rheumatism of the back had united most of the vertebrae into a solid mass down the inner side. In another case there had been a rickety curvature of the spine. To find so many peculiarities in only about fifteen skeletons which I collected, is strange. These are all in the Royal College of Surgeons now, for study. Medum has, then, led us some way further back than we had reached before in the history of Egyptian civilization; but it has shown how vastly our information must be increased before the problems are solved. CHAPTER XI. THE FRESH LIGHT ON THE PAST. It might seem as if the researches described in these chapters were, though interesting in themselves, yet not of particular account in the wider view of human history and civilization. It is to focus together this new information, to show the results which flow from it, and to give a connected idea of our fresh light on the past, that this chapter is placed here. The application of scientific principles to archaeology, the opening of fresh methods of enquiry, and the rigorous notice of the period of everything found, have been as fruitful in the East as it has proved to be in the West. In Egypt, the oldest condition of the present country that is known--the beginning of history as distinct from geology--is an age of great rainfall and denudation; succeeding to the geological age, in which the existing masses of surface gravels were laid down. This rain promoted vegetation, as in a previous age of which remains are seen in the various silicified forests, which occur where circumstances favoured their preservation. The amount of water falling on the country swelled the volume of the Nile to far beyond its greatest modern extent. Between the cliffs on either hand it ran certainly hundreds of feet higher than at present, probably in part as an estuary. The cliffs all along the Nile are worn by water running at a great height; and the _débris_ brought down from the side valleys is piled up in hills at the mouths of the valleys, in a way that could only occur where they discharged into deep water. That the rain sufficed to fill up such a vast volume, we can believe, when we see the gorges cut back in the sides of the Nile cliffs by the lateral drainage. These often run back for some miles, ploughed out by receding waterfalls--small Niagaras--which have each left at the valley head their precipitous fall of polished rock, with a great basin below it hollowed by the force of the torrent. Such was the source of the power which has scoured out the whole Nile valley for a depth of over two hundred feet. High up on the hills between the Nile and the Fayum, the very crest of the hill is