sceptre is to give the sign of acceptance or condemnation. Here the deceased has crossed the living valley and river, and in the caves of the death region, where the howl of the wild dog is heard by night, is this process of judgment going forward; and none but those who have seen the contrasts of the region with their own eyes,-none who have received the idea through the borrowed imagery of the Greeks or the traditions of any other people, can have any adequate notion how the mortuary ideas of the primitive Egyptians, and, through them, of the civilized world at large, have been originated by the everlasting conflict of the Nile and the Desert.

How the presence of these elements has, in all ages, determined the occupations and habits of the inhabitants, needs only to be pointed out; the fishing, the navigation, and the most amphibious habits of the people are what they owe to the Nile, and their practice of laborious tillage to the Desert. A more striking instance of patient industry can nowhere be found, than in the method of irrigation practised in all times in this valley. After the subsidence of the Nile, every drop of water needed for tillage, and for all other purposes, for the rest of the year, is hauled up, and distributed by human labour, up to the point where the sakia, worked by oxen, supersedes the shadoof, worked by men. Truly the Desert is here a hard taskmaster, or, rather, a pertinacious enemy to be incessantly guarded against; but yet a friendly adversary, inasmuch as such natural compulsion to toil is favourable to a nation's character.

One other obligation which the Egyptians owe to the Desert struck me freshly and forcibly, from the beginning of our voyage to the end. It plainly originated their ideas of art; not those of the present inhabitants, which are wholly Saracenic still, but those of the primitive race who appear to have originated art all over the world. The first thing that impressed me in the Nile scenery, above Cairo, was the angularity in all the forms. The trees appeared almost the only exceptions. The lime of the Arabian hills soon became so even as to give them the appearance of being supports of a vast table-land, while the sand, heaped up at their bases, was like a row of pyramids. Elsewhere, one's idea of sand-hills is, that of all round eminences they are the roundest; but here their form is generally that of truncated pyramids. The entrances of the caverns are squares. The masses of sand left by the Nile are square. The river banks are graduated by the action of the water, so that one may see a hundred natural nilometers in as many miles. Then again the forms of the rocks, especially the limestone ranges, are remarkably grotesque. In a few days, I saw, without looking

at them, so many colossal figures of men and animals springing from the natural rocks, so many sphinxes and strange birds, that I was quite prepared for anything I afterwards saw in the temples. The higher we went up the country, the more pyramidal became the forms even of the mud houses of the modern people; and in Nubia they were worthy, from their angularity, of old Egypt. It is possible that the people of Abyssinia might, in some obscure age, have derived their ideas of art from Hindostan, and propagated them down the Nile. No one can now positively contradict it. But I did not feel on the spot that any derived art was likely to be in such perfect harmony with its surroundings" as that of Egypt certainly is,—a harmony so wonderful as to be, perhaps, the most striking circumstance of all to an European coming from a country where all art is derived, and its main beauty therefore lost. It is useless to speak of the beauty of Egyptian architecture and sculpture to those who, not going to Egypt, can form no conception as to its main condition, its appropriateness.

I need not add that I think it worse than useless to adopt Egyptian forms and decorations in countries where there is no Nile and no Desert, and where decorations are not, as in Egypt, fraught with meaning-pictured language-messages to the gazer. But I must speak more of this hereafter. Suffice it now that in the hills, angular at their summits, with angular mounds at their bases, and angular caves in their strata, we could not but at once see the originals of temples, pyramids, and tombs. Indeed, the pyramids look like an eternal fixing down of the shifting sand-hills which are here the main features of the Desert. If we consider further what facility the Desert has afforded for scientific observations,-how it was the field of the meteorological studies of the Egyptians, and how its permanent pyramidal forms served them, whether original or by derivation, with instruments and calculation for astronomical purposes, we shall see that, one way or another, the Desert has been a great benefactor to the Egyptians of all times, however fairly regarded in some sense as an enemy. The sand may, as I said before, have a fair side to its character, if it has taken a leading part in determining the ideas, the feelings, the worship, the occupation, the habits, and the arts of the people of the Nile valley for many thousand years.-H. MARTINEAU.

1. An animal somewhat like a rat, found in Barbary, Egypt, Syria, &c. It lives in burrows, and becomes torpid during winter.

2. The hyana is confined to the old world, especially Asia and Africa. There ree species known, the striped

hyæna, the spotted and the brown. They
are nocturnal animals inhabiting caves,
feeding chiefly on dead bodies, to obtain
which, they will even dig up graves.
3. What case?

4. What effect has this vigilance on the character of the Dutch?

5. Osiris was one of the principal | Egyptian deities, the brother of Isis, and the father of Orus. He was venerated under the forms of the sacred bulls, Apis and Mnevis, or as a human figure with a bull's head, distinguished by the nanie of Apis-Osiris. He is commonly represented as clad in pure white, and his usual attributes are the high cap, the flail or whip, and the crozier. Osiris, in common with Isis, presided over the world below.

6. Amphibious, having the power of living in two elements, air and water, as frogs, crocodiles, &c.

7. Colossus, both in Greek and Latin, means a statue of gigantic size. The most famous colossus of antiquity was one at Rhodes, a statue of Apollo, so high that it is said, but not generally believed, I suppose, that ships might sail between its legs.

8. What part of speech? 9. Meaning of fraught? 10. Meteorology is the science of me. teors, or the science which explains the various phenomena which have their origin in the atmosphere. Under the term meteorology, it is now usual to include, not merely the observation of the accidental phenomena, to which the name meteor is applied, but every terrestrial as well as atmospherical phenomenon, whether accidental or permanent, depending on the action of heat, lignt, electricity, and magnetism. In this extended signification, meteorology comprehends climatology, and greater part of physical geography, and its object is to determine the diversified and incessantly changing influences of the four great agents of nature, now named, on land, in the sea, and in the atmosphere.

the

66

"By seizing the isthmus of Darien" said Sir Walter Raleigh, you will wrest the keys of the world from Spain." The observation, worthy of his reach of thought, is still more applicable to the isthmus of Suez and the country of Egypt. It is remark

able that its importance has never been duly appreciated but by the greatest conquerors of ancient and modern times, Alexander the Great and Napoleon Buonaparte. The geographical position of this celebrated country has destined it to be a great emporium' of the commerce of the world. Placed in the centre between Europe and Asia, on the confines of eastern wealth and western civilization, at the extremity of the African continent and on the shores of the Mediterranean sea, it is fitted to become the central point of communication for the varied productions of these different regions of the globe. The waters of the Mediterranean bring to it all the fabrics of Europe, the Red Sea wafts to its shores the riches of India and China, while the Nile floats down to its bosom the produce of the vast and unknown Africa. Though it were not one of the most fertile countries in the world, though the inundations of the Nile did not annually cover its fields with riches, it would still be, from its situation, one of the most favoured spots on the earth. The greatest and

in the same manner as the Rhine and the Maese do in Holland at present. The extent and easiness of this inland navigation was 6 probably one of the principal causes of the early improvement of Egypt.

The improvements in agriculture and manufactures seem likewise to have been of very great antiquity in the provinces of Bengal, in the East Indies, and in some of the eastern provinces of China, though the great extent of this antiquity is not authenticated by any histories, of whose authority we, in this part of the world, are well assured. In Bengal, the Ganges and several other great rivers form a great number of navigable canals, in the same manner as the Nile does in Egypt. In the eastern provinces of China, too, several great rivers form, by their different branches, a multitude of canals, and, by communicating with one another, afford an inland navigation much more extensive than that either of the Nile or the Ganges, or, perhaps, than both of them put together. It is remarkable that neither the ancient Egyptians, nor the Indians, nor the Chinese, encouraged foreign commerce, 10 but seem all to have derived their great opulence from this inland navigation.

All the inland parts of Africa, and all that part of Asia which lies any considerable way north of the Euxine and Caspian seas, the ancient Scythia, the modern Tartary and Siberia, seem in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we find them at present. The sea of Tartary is the Frozen Ocean, which admits of no navigation; and though some of the greatest rivers in the world run through that country, they are at too great a distance from one another to carry commerce and communication through the greater part of it. There are in Africa none of those great inlets, such as the Baltic and Adriatic seas in Europe; the Mediterranean and Euxine seas, both in Europe and Asia; and the gulfs of Arabia, Persia, India, Bengal, and Siam, in Asia, to carry maritime commerce into the interior parts of that great continent; and the great rivers of Africa are at too great a distance from one another to give occasion to any considerable inland navigation. The commerce, besides, which any nation can carry on by means of a river which does not break itself into any great number of branches or canals, and which runs into another territory before it reaches the sea, can never be very considerable, because it is always in the power of the nations who possess that other territory to obstruct the communication between the upper country and the sea. The navigation of the Danube is of very little use to the different states of Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary, in comparison with what it would be if any of them

possessed the whole of its course, till it falls into the Black Sea. -SMITH'S 'Wealth of Nations.'

THE original station allotted to man by his Creator was in the mild and fertile regions of the East. There the human race began its career of improvement; and, from the remains of sciences which were anciently cultivated, as well as of arts which were anciently exercised in India, we may conclude it to be one of the first countries in which men made any considerable progress in that career. The wisdom of the East was early celebrated, and its productions were early in request among distant nations. The intercourse, however, between different countries was carried on, at first, entirely by land. As the people of the East appear soon to have acquired complete dominion over the useful animals, they could early undertake the long and tiresome journeys which it was necessary to make, in order to maintain their intercourse, and by the provident bounty of heaven they were furnished with a beast of burden, without whose aid it would have been impossible to accomplish them. The camel, by its persevering strength, by its moderation in the use of food, and the singularity of its internal structure, which enables it to lay in a stock of water sufficient for several days, put it in their power to convey bulky commodities through those deserts which must be traversed by all who travel from any of the countries west of the Euphrates, towards India. Trade was carried on in this manner, particularly by the nations near to the Arabian Gulf,3 from the earliest period to which historical information reaches. Distant journeys, however, would be undertaken at first only occasionally, and by a few adventurers. But by degrees, from attention to their