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kind to conceive what vast resources a commercial people possess, and what great exertions they are capable of making.-ROBERTSON'S Disquisition on Ancient India.'

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FROM the beginning, the people of Egypt have had everything to hope from the river, nothing from the desert; much to fear from the desert, and little from the river. What their fear may reasonably be, any one may know who looks upon a hillocky expanse of sand, where the little jerboa1 burrows, and the hyæna prowls at night. Under these hillocks lie temples and palaces, and under the level sands a whole city. The enemy has come in from behind, and stifled and buried it. What is the hope of the people from the river, any one may witness who, at the regular season, sees the people grouped on the eminences, watching the advancing waters, and listening for the voice of the crier, or the boom of the cannon, which is to tell the prospect or event of the inundation of the year. Who can estimate the effect on a nation's mind and character, of a perpetual vigilance against the desert (see what it is in Holland of a similar vigilance against the sea) and of an annual mood of hope in regard to the Nile? Who cannot see what a stimulating and enlivening influence this periodical anxiety and relief must exercise on the character of a nation? And then, there is the effect on their ideas. The Nile was naturally deified by the old inhabitants. It was a god to the mass, and, at least, one of the manifestations of deity to the priestly class. As it was the immediate cause of all they had, and all they hoped for the creative power regularly at work before their eyes, usually conquering, though occasionally checked, it was to them the good power, and the desert was the

evil one. Hence came a main part of their faith embodied in the allegory of the burial of Osiris' in the sacred stream, whence he rose, once a year, to scatter blessings over the earth. Then the structure of their country originated or modified their idea of death and life. As to the disposal of their dead, they could not dream of consigning their dead to the waters which were too sacred to receive any meaner body than the incorruptible one of Osiris; nor must any other be placed within reach of its waters, or in the way of the pure production of the valley. There were the boundary rocks, with the limits afforded by their caves. These became sacred to the dead. After the accumulations of a few generations of corpses, it became clear how much more extensive was the world of the dead than of the living; and as the proportion of the living to the dead became, before men's eyes, smaller and smaller, the state of the dead became a subject of proportionate importance to them, till their faith and practice grew into what we see them in the records of the temples and tombs, engrossed with the idea of death, and in preparation for it. The unseen world became all in all to them; and the visible world and present life of little more importance than as the necessary introduction to the higher and greater.

The imagery before their eyes perpetually sustained these modes of thought. Everywhere they had in presence symbols of the worlds of death and life, the limited scene of production, activity, and change, the valley with its verdure, its floods, and its busy multitudes, who were all incessantly passing away to be succeeded by their like; while, as a boundary to this scene of life, lay the region of death, to their view unlimited, and everlastingly silent to the human ear. Their imagery of death was wholly suggested by the scenery of their abode. Our reception of this is much injured by our having been familiarised with it, first, through the ignorant and vulgarised Greek adoption of it, in their imagery of Charon, Styx, Cerberus, and Rhadamanthus; but if we can forget these, and look upon the older records with fresh eyes, it is inexpressibly interesting to contemplate the symbolical representations of death by the oldest of the Egyptians, before Greek or Persian was heard of in the world: the passage of the dead across the river or lake of the valley, attended by the conductor of souls, the god Anubis, the formidable dog, the guardian of the mansion of Osiris (or the divine abode); the balance in which the heart or deeds of the deceased are weighed against the symbol of integrity; the infant Harpocrates, the emblem of new life, seated before the throne of the judge; the range of assessors who are to pronounce on the life of the being come up to the judgment; and, finally, the judge himself, whose suspended

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, | hyæna, the spotted and the brown. They found in Barbary, Egypt, Syria, &c. It are nocturnal animals inhabiting caves, lives in burrows, and becomes torpid feeding chiefly on dead bodies, to obtain during winter. which, they will even dig up graves. 3. What case?

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

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

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SEC. I.]

NATURAL HISTORY.

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.

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8. What part of speech? 9. Meaning of fraught? 10. Meteorology is the science of meteors, 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.

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"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 remarkable 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

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