Dr. Andrews was travelling in Egypt some years ago, and joined a party of officers of the great survey of Egypt in a visit to the Great Western Desert, the rainless, sandy waste west of the Nile, not very far from what is now called the Fayoum, and where in Roman days was the great Lake Mœris, now dried up to a mere brine pool, in the salt water of which the fresh-water fishes of the Nile still live. The surveying party intended to determine the geological age of these sands, which stretch for hundreds of miles, often rising into cliffs which are cut sharp by the wind and show horizontal stratification. The geologists determined that the sands of this region were of Eocene and Miocene Age, and from them Dr. Andrews brought home some very interesting bones. These included the remains of a more primitive Mastodon than any as yet known, and of an animal which he called Meritherium, which is a connecting link between elephants and other mammals. The collection included also remains of great flesh-eating beasts, and of sea cows, of tortoises, and of a snake sixty feet long! However, in regard to the history of elephants, the upshot of Dr. Andrews' most important discoveries is that we find living here in the Upper Eocene period (which is older than the age in which the _Tetrabelodon Mastodon_ was found) an elephant ancestor of the kind to which Dr. Andrews gave the name of _Palæomastodon_ or "ancient mastodon." We thus arrive at an ancestral elephant-like creature which serves to join the elephant stock on to more ordinary mammals. This beast was not so very big, perhaps about the same size as an ordinary cart-horse. Dr. Andrews' further triumph was the additional discovery of the rather smaller animal which he called the _Meritherium_, and which was undoubtedly an elephant of sorts, though at first sight it has no resemblance to one, and probably had no trunk at all. It certainly had no big tusks; but its teeth make us certain that it belonged to the elephant family. "Here, then," says Sir E. Ray Lankester, "we have arrived at a form which undoubtedly was closely related to the ancestors of all the elephants, if not actually itself that ancestor, and in it we see the origin of the elephants peculiar structure. From this comparatively normal pig-like _Meritherium_, the wonderful elephant, with his upright face, his dependent trunk, and his huge spreading tusks has been gradually, step by step, produced. And we have seen some, at least, of the intermediate steps--the lengthening of the jaws and the increase in the size of the teeth in the _Palæomastodon_--carried still further on by the _Tetrabelodon_, and then followed by a shrinkage of the lower jaw and final evolution of the middle part of the face and upper jaw into the drooping, wonderful, prehensile trunk."