the midst of one of which the house stands, are thought at Alexandria to be highly insalubrious, being covered, morning and evening, it is said, with a dense cloud of vapour, which they nourish and maintain perpetually. This may possibly be the case near the sea, where the air is moist and heavy, but it would seem to be otherwise up the country; since, both in Upper and Lower Egypt, all the towns and villages are surrounded by palm groves; yet the people, though short-lived, are not unhealthy, or particularly liable to intermittent fevers or to typhus. I should, in fact, consider a wood of date palms to be the least unhealthy of all groves, the trees being planted at regular distances, forming vast avenues, as of columns, between which, from the absence of all boughs, excepting at the top, the air circulates freely. Here I observed, for the first time, the Egyptian system of irrigation, which comprehends three different methods. When the surface of the river is about four or six feet below the ground to be irrigated, the lever and basket and the Persian wheel are used; the former worked by men, the latter by cattle. But as the waters decrease, and greater power is required to bring up equal quantities in like times, they make use of the common mechanical contrivance called a sakia, in principle the result of the experience of ages; but generally so defective in construction, that much water or labour is lost. Four Persian wheels, each turned by two oxen, are able, in twenty-four hours, when the water is four feet below the surface of the ground, to raise sufficient water for the ordinary purpose of irrigating one thousand five hundred fedans * of land. Windmills for raising water, and chain pumps, have been introduced into Egypt; but as these are machines which require some regard to the principles of good workmanship, they are by no means fitted for general use. Once up, they are certainly of great advantage so long as they require no repairs; but when they go wrong, the Arab is unable to put them to rights. For the service of a sakia, there are required, in general, eight good oxent, the feeding of which, with the wages of the persons who attend upon them, amounts to about thirty piastres per day. One man commonly attends upon several sakias; so that in a farm where thirty or forty oxen are employed in the business of irrigation, four or five men would suffice. The oxen or cows are driven by boys or women. If, however, the government, with a due regard to its own interests and the happiness of the people, should ever entertain the ambition of acquiring an accession of territory at home, and would make the requisite outlay in repairing and enlarging the existing canals, and forming new ones, sufficient water might be retained in them, after the inundation, for the service of the whole year, without the labour of a single ox. * A fedan is an acre and one eighth. The price of a common ox is about 700 piastres, or 71. 15s.; that of a superior one about 1000 piastres, or 117. The present value of the piastre is something short of three-pence sterling. The construction of the necessary sluices would be the principal expense; for there is perhaps no country in the world where a canal may be dug so cheaply as in Egypt. Mr. Wallace has seen in the Said a canal six miles in length, and of that great breadth and depth which are so peculiar to the canals of this country, the whole expense of forming which did not exceed 1400 ardebs of wheat, at thirty piastres the ardeb. The labourers employed in such works have no tools, no wheelbarrows, none of the aids derived from mechanics in Europe. All over Egypt, from Rosetta to Es-Souan, there are officers appointed by government to inspect the state of the canals, dikes, embankments, and the general face of the country after each inundation; and it is their business to report the nature and amount of the damage done by the river, with the ways and means of repairing them, to the mamoors of the provinces, who, in their turn, lay the matter before the Pasha; for every thing comes before him. But these district engineers are all miserable Arabs, extremely ignorant in every branch of their profession, so that no good can possibly originate from them, as is but too clearly proved by the general appearance of the country; vast tracts of which — a fifth, perhaps, of the whole-have been, by their neglect, allowed to lie uncultivated, and gradually to become a prey to, and mingle with, the desert. The nature of the soil of Egypt seems to be better adapted for the purposes of irrigation than that of any other country; for the particles composing the general mass of alluvial matter are so fine, so close, so compact, that little or no loss is experienced from infiltration by water running along its surface. Thus we see the water raised by a sakia on the banks of the Nile sent in a small stream to the distance of several miles, with no apparent loss from infiltration. The surface of the ground to be irrigated is laid out in small oblong squares, divided from each other by diminutive ridges of earth. Those nearest the watercourse are of necessity first overflowed, the quantity of water being according to the season of the year and the nature of the cultivation; and when those have been allowed a sufficient time for imbibing the requisite moisture, the water is turned successively into all the others, the tiny bank of separation being broken down by the foot.* Monday, Nov. 12. VII. The greater part of this day was spent in examining a collection of small Egyptian idols, scarabæi, and bronze Ptolemaic medals, possessed by Mr. Harris, a merchant of Alexandria, who unites with his commercial pursuits an enlightened taste for From a passage in the Pentateuch we discover that this is precisely the practice which prevailed of old. "The land, whither thou goest in to possess it, is not as the land of Egypt, from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs: but the land whither ye go to possess it is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven,” Deut. xi. 10, 11. EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES. - 17 literature and antiquities. As the greater number of these antiques are articles of rare occurrence, and some of them, perhaps, unique, a concise description of the more remarkable may not be thought altogether uninteresting : — 1. Twenty-two scarabæi, of which several are of marble. One of these, of a fine-grained greenstone, is very exquisitely sculptured; the wings, closed upon the back, and the legs, which nearly meet in front, being wrought with singular minuteness and delicacy. The bottom or slab upon which the beetle rests is charged with hieroglyphics, of equally excellent workmanship; and the whole was originally covered with gold leaf, of which several pieces of considerable thickness still adhere to the side. Another scarabæus, of a kind of black ironstone, polished like a mirror, had been broken, and repaired, by the Egyptians themselves, with a resinous sort of cement, which holds together, with great tenacity, the broken pieces of the stone. Several of the scarabæi are of what, in the East, is called root of emerald, or coarse emerald; others of a beautiful green jasper. In these diminutive objects of their worship, the Egyptians exhibited the same passion for allegorical representation discoverable in the paintings and intaglios of a mythological character which cover the walls of their temples and palaces: upon the body of one of the scarabæi is sculptured the head of a woman; another, from the ruins of Thebes, is fashioned like a jar, and has the beetle sculptured on one side; a third, from Memphis, is adorned with the figure of the phoenix, |