I.—The Gulf of Suez

In a previous paper published in this Magazine, I gave reasons for the belief that neither the Gulf of Suez nor the valley of the Nile owes its origin to trough-faulting, as was at that time generally supposed. The skeleton of the argument was as follows:—1. Extensive faulting at the faces of the scarps of the Nile Valley and Gulf of Suez cannot be held to be evidence of trough-faulting, since the same can be observed along the scarps of the Wadi Araba, the structure of whose floor shows it to be an eroded anticline, and the faults along its scarp-faces to be merely huge landslips.2. The faulting observable immediately along the coast of the Gulf of Suez is of an exactly similar nature to that above mentioned, and along part at least of the gulf the strata dip away from the sea on the opposite coasts, leading to the inference that the Gulf of Suez is, like the Wadi Araba, an eroded anticline.3. If it be granted that the Gulf of Suez is not a trough-fault, the argument against the Nile Valley being a trough-fault is strengthened, the support of parallelism being removed.