about the peoples who live upon both sides of it, who, as in the case of most Eastern peoples of nomadic or semi-nomadic habits, are apt to be now upon one side of the line and now upon the other. All this I hope Major Lloyd will be able to tell us, and I will ask him to address you.

Major H. I. Lloyd then read the paper printed above, and a discussion followed.

Sir PERCY COox: A frontier line is not a subject on which it is easy to be expansive, and I have not much of interest to add to what Major Lloyd has told us to-night. There are, however, one or two points which I should be glad to comment upon or amplify. Firstly, as regards our negotiations with Turkey. At the deliberations which took place at Lausanne in connection with the elaboration of the treaty a point was reached when everything had been practically settled except the question of the 'Iraq Frontier, and in regard to that no common ground was apparent between the claims of the Turks and ourselves. It was accordingly decided to complete the treaty and leave the question of the 'Iraq frontier for direct settlement between the Turks and ourselves.

I believe Lord Curzon, who was representing us at Lausanne, thought at the time that it was of no use attempting a direct settlement with Turkey for this same reason, namely that there was no common terrain on which to negotiate, and he would have preferred to go to the League at once. The Turks, however, persistently pressed for a period in which to seek a direct settlement with us. They asked for a year; we suggested six months, and finally it was fixed at nine months. At the end of nine months I was sent to Constantinople -I should like to emphasize that it was by the Labour Government-to endeavour to reach a solution with the Turks. I took with me for negotiation the frontier which Major Lloyd has told us about to-night-the result of months of study and examination on the spot. Every possible aspect had been considered in the attempt to find a really good frontier, and incidentally an immense amount of air reconnaissance was carried out in a perfectly ghastly country for flying, as you will have understood from some of the pictures which the lecturer has shown us on the screen.

I was instructed to offer this frontier as the best possible, and to express my readiness on behalf of His Majesty's Government to negotiate such modifications of detail as might be necessary for local reasons. But I could find no common ground upon which to negotiate. The answer of the Turkish delegates to my proposition was that they thought, on the contrary, that we should agree in principle to the rendition of the Mosul Vilayet, and that if we did they were prepared to discuss possibilities of economic compensation for us. But in fact we were discussing a territory for which we had taken a mandate, and no such compromise was conceivably possible; so after six weeks of fruitless argument I was told to break off the negotiations.

Now there has been a Frontier Award by the League of Nations. The line in question no doubt provides a possible frontier, though one is better than another naturally. But all those ranges of hills, hills, and hill crests offer a possible frontier, and if we can by any means get the Turks to come to a reasonable understanding on this question there should be a great future for 'Iraq. But the most disturbing issue, to my mind, is the fate of the Assyrian Christians, of whom there about 80,000 men, women, and children; half of them are across the present frontier and half of them on this side of it. In the case of the frontier for which I was instructed to press, we hoped there was sufficient suitable country on this side of it to enable us to bring all the Christians inside our limits. That idea has gone by the board now, and I must admit it is a great disappointment to me. One would have thought that the fate of that Christian nation, small as it is, was a matter for which Christendom in general should have had some concern. We (i.e. Great Britain) have done all we can, but Christendom has done nothing at all, and the fate of those people hangs on the negotiations which are now going on with Turkey. We can only hope that a reasonable solution will be arrived at.

I cannot deny myself this opportunity of paying a tribute to the devoted band of Englishmen of which Major Lloyd, our lecturer to-night, is a member. During the war I was Civil Commissioner with the Army, and had to organize civil administration behind the Army as we advanced. In the natural course of events all the administrative personnel of the Turkish régime, practically all Turks, retreated with the Turkish army and we had to replace them with British officers. The careers of the latter were safe as long as their units remained in the country, but when the time for demobilization came, and when, a little later on, I was sent out to organize a native administration as the only alternative to evacuation, there clearly had to be great reduction in the British personnel; and though we still had to retain a small proportion of them, the future for those who remained was a most uncertain one. They had no guarantee whatever of an assured career; they simply stayed on, working with the utmost devotion year after year up to now, in suspense all the time, and simply kept going by enthusiasm for the country and their work. Meantime they were losing with more and more certainty all chance of a career at home, while in the absence of any guarantee from the British Treasury their future in 'Iraq was extremely problematical. Now we hope that by the grace of God and the League of Nations their future career is assured, for they have got definite contracts with the 'Iraq Government. But we cannot easily realize sufficiently what we owe to this devoted band of British officers, and I am very glad of this opportunity to pay tribute to them.

Sir ARNOLD WILSON: I wish that Major Lloyd could have been a little less modest and a little less reticent: the slides he has shown us to-night recalled memories to me of battle, murder, and sudden death, of hopes which have mostly gone by the board, and of fears some of which have been realized. He is clearly not a stamp collector, or he would have remembered that there was considerable doubt as to the future of the Mosul Vilayet when we first occupied it, for a special series of stamps was issued for use in post offices in that vilayet by way of emphasizing the fact that, as between ourselves and the French, its status had not been decided.

Too great emphasis has perhaps been laid on the strategic importance of the Brussels Line versus our Line. There is undoubtedly a strategical aspect, but I think, as Sir Percy Cox said, the main considerations that actuated us in accepting the Brussels Line, although we should have liked a better line, were administrative. On administrative grounds it is of great importance to have a good line to avoid raids and discontent and to keep the tribes on either side of the frontier together as far as possible. It is possible to over-emphasize the strategical aspect. If ever Turkish troops are sent to capture the Mosul Vilayet they will not be sent over the country we have seen on the screen this evening. They will come from the west. There is an easy route open to them by the Baghdad railway. It is true that a few hundred kilometres of that railway lie in French territory, but troops can be transported up to a point not far from Muslimiyé by rail, and transported in motors and taken across by road to the point where the Baghdad Railway re-enters Turkish territory. Thence they can be shipped on to Nisibin or any other convenient point.

I wish also that Major Lloyd had told us a little more about the other Mosul frontier, that of Syria. He has paid tribute to the good nature of the French in not pressing us too much; but I fancy that it would have been exceedingly inconvenient to them, pressed as they were themselves, to have attempted to take over those portions of the Mosul Vilayet which were in dispute between us. I think also they are occupying 'Iraq territory near Abu Kamal. There has been a good deal of give and take, but it has not been all giving on their side and all taking on ours.

I had a letter last month on this subject from a friend (not an Irishman) saying that "if things go on as at present finality is the last thing we shall reach." If that is the case, it is partly due to the absence of reliable maps, of which Major Lloyd has complained. It is rather remarkable that we should have to depend in 1926 mainly upon the very remarkable series of maps made by Col. Maunsell, whose absence to-night we all regret, and to whom we owe a very great debt. They were compiled at the beginning of the present century by Col. Maunsell after a long series of tours. Those maps, which have been corrected from time to time, have never been fully replaced by any other series on the same scale (1/250,000), although we have been in the Mosul Vilayet for the last five or six years. We have a 1-inch survey of practically the whole flat area of Mesopotamia, and a 6-inch survey of quite considerable portions of it. But apparently there is no 1-inch map of the essential portions of the frontier. I have had sufficient experience of laying down a frontier from bad maps to know the immense importance of having good maps. I can only hope that during the next few years the necessary maps will be prepared, so that when we come to settle this frontier with Turkey it will be possible to do it with some approach to finality.

In regard to the Herki and other nomads, Major Lloyd suggested that it was unlikely that they would continue to migrate from 'Iraq into Turkey owing to the division of their country between two Powers. I am not at all sure that that will happen in practice. The Jaf and other tribes, who have their summer pasturage exclusively in Persia, contrive to emigrate regularly between 'Iraq and Persia. There are certain advantages in having summer and winter resorts in different countries. It may be necessary to pay taxes twice, but there is always a sporting chance that it may be possible to avoid paying at all, and the Jaf have in the past been extraordinarily successful in that respect. I do not think that the nomadic habits of Kurdish tribes will be suppressed.

The Brussels Line cannot, in my opinion, be regarded as a final settlement. There must be further negotiations before we can settle the matter. It is a frontier which has very little in its favour from the purely administrative point of view, and not much in its favour from the broader point of view-it does not settle the great question of the Assyrian Christians, and, what perhaps is more important, it does not give the peoples who are living immediately north of it access to a market. There are 20,000 or 30,000 tribesmen living north of the Brussels Line who cannot obtain access to a Turkish market without great difficulty, and will have almost equal difficulty, owing to their exclusion from 'Iraq, in obtaining access to the town of Mosul or its ancillary towns. There will have to be further negotiations, and all that we and the people of 'Iraq can do is to be patient and wait until public opinion in Turkey becomes more favourable to an amicable settlement of these matters. I do not think that time will be long in coming.

The PRESIDENT: It is satisfactory to be reassured that after all the Brussels

Line is not so bad, though some of the views we saw might have created a different impression! It is an extraordinarily interesting country. We call it Mosul or 'Iraq in our own times, but it was anciently just Assyria. In the south was the city of Asshur and in the north Nineveh, Calah, and Arbela. It was rich enough then to breed and maintain a mighty imperial people. Year by year its kings marched up into those great hills which Major Lloyd showed us on his map, and tried to hold them, but were never quite successful; and eventually the country was overrun and the Assyrians were overwhelmed by people who came through those hills. I do not know what a Turkish army may do in the future; probably modern conditions will bring it, as Sir Arnold Wilson said, from the west; but it was from the north that the people who overwhelmed the Assyrians came. I hope that this is not an omen, and that such will not be the future fate of 'Iraq !

The photographs which were shown gave a very good idea of the country. A good account of the Mosul Vilayet and of the people there is given in a book of the late Lord Percy's. To my mind it is much the best description of the great Alpine district of Hakkiari to which Major Lloyd referred, and to that book I should go if I wanted an account of the country. It also contains a very interesting account of the later stages of Turkish rule in the country. It is astonishing to see how well, in the face of all their difficulties, the Turks succeeded in establishing an administration in that country and how they managed to maintain their rule.

The hour is late, and I will not enlarge on that. We owe it to our lecturer that we have kept off anything like contentious politics. I do not suppose that we have heard the last by any means of contention about Mosul; but for the present the line is fixed for us, and, as I said at the beginning, we may regard the political question as over. Since our lecturer has done that for us, and has manfully dealt at very short notice with an extraordinarily difficult question in an exceedingly difficult country, we owe him our very sincere thanks. I know better than anybody else what his difficulties have been in getting his slides and notes together at very short notice; also, he has been compelled to put up with photographs which he had not himself taken and which had not been made with the intention of being used to illustrate such a lecture as this. It is far easier to lecture if one has had long notice and been able to provide oneself with views which will exactly illustrate what one has to say. Major Lloyd has not had that advantage, but he has extricated himself very well from the difficulties into which his kindness in responding to our invitation landed him.

THE NYASALAND SECTION OF THE GREAT
RIFT VALLEY

F. Dixey, D.Sc., F.G.S.

Read at the Afternoon Meeting of the Society, 17 May 1926. 1. Introduction.

IN

N the course of the Geological Survey of Nyasaland during the last three years some observations have been made that are perhaps of considerable interest in connection with the history of lake Nyasa and the development of that part of the Great Rift Valley in which it lies, and in the light of these and earlier observations it has been possible to determine the sequence of events outlined in the following paragraphs.

In his well-known account of the Great Rift Valley (II.) * Professor J. W. Gregory states that this remarkable trough extends from Lebanon to the Sabi River and includes the rifts in which lie, for example, the Dead Sea, the Red Sea, lakes Albert, Tanganyika, and Nyasa, and the Shire River; that in late Cretaceous or early Tertiary times there arose a great meridional arch, the crown of which, upon the relief of lateral compression, subsided between parallel fractures to form the Rift Valley; that the faulting began in the Oligocene (II., p. 204) and was continued principally in the Pliocene and in the Pleistocene (II., p. 105); and that the movements were accompanied from time to time by great volcanic activity. Furthermore, with special reference to the Nyasan Rift, Professor Gregory has adduced evidence, admittedly rather uncertain (II., p. 298), that an arm of the sea extended up into lake Nyasa during the Oligocene, while A. R. Andrew and T. E. G. Bailey have shown (I., p. 223) that lacustrine shell beds, believed to be of Recent geological age, stand at a height of 700 feet above the present level of Nyasa. It should be mentioned that the first connected account of the geology and physiography of Nyasaland as a whole is due to Andrew and Bailey, and the observations of these authors have served as the basis for subsequent work.

The present paper puts forward the view that in the early Cretaceous, or possibly late Jurassic, the initial uplift in the Nyasa region took the form of a gentle anticlinorium,† and that the more or less meridional troughs so produced were occupied in due course by rivers and possibly by lakes; then at a later date rift faulting began, and this continued intermittently throughout a large part of Tertiary and Quaternary times. Moreover, there appeared several sets of intersecting faults that extended into the region bordering the main rift on either side, and of these the meridional faults were frequently of later date than those of diagonal trend. A similar sequence of faults has been observed in Tanganyika Territory (II., p. 292). The volcanic history of the area appears to have been very largely confined to a brief phase, developed at the northern end of lake Nyasa, that took place in the late Tertiary or early Quaternary period. Finally, while the later work has not yet yielded any evidence to support the hypothesis of a marine sedimentary phase of Oligocene age, the lacustrine beds formerly thought to be of Recent age are now known to date back to Pliocene times and to rest with strong unconformity upon post-Cretaceous lacustrine sediments that are possibly

of Miocene age. It will be shown that lake Nyasa has varied in area

The numerals in parentheses refer to the Bibliography on p. 137.

† "Anticlinorium" is used by geologists to denote a larger anticline upon which are superposed a number of minor anticlines running parallel with it; but the word may be criticized as hybrid. ED. G.J.