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. 10 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 are three species known, the striped hyæna, the spotted and the brown. They 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 the 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. Fertile. "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 most durable monuments of human history, accordingly, the earliest efforts of civilization, the sublimest works of genius, have been raised in this primeval seat of mankind. The temples of Rome have decayed, the arts of Athens have perished; but the Pyramids "still stand erect and unshaken above the floods of the Nile." When, in the revolution of ages, civilization shall have returned to its ancient cradle,-when the desolation of Mahometan rule shall have ceased, and the light of religion illumined the land of its birth, Egypt will again become one of the great centres of human industry; the invention of steam will restore the communication with the East to its original channel; and the nation which shall revive the canal of Suez, and open a direct communication between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, will pour into its bosom those streams of wealth which in every age have constituted the principal scources of European opulence. The great Leibnitz,3 in the time of Louis XIV., addressed to the French monarch a memorial, which is one of the noblest monuments of political foresight :-" Sire," said he, “it is not at home that you will succeed in subduing the Dutch: you will not cross their dykes, and you will rouse Europe to their assistance. It is in Egypt that the real blow is to be struck. There you will find the true commercial route to India; you will wrest that lucrative commerce from Holland, you will secure the eternal dominion of France in the Levant, you will fill Christianity with joy." These ideas, however, were beyond the age, and they lay dormant till revived by the genius of Napoleon. The eagle eye of Alexander the Great, which fitted him to have been as great a benefactor as he was a Scourge of his species, early discerned the vast capabilities of this country; and to him was owing the foundation of that city, the rival of Memphis and Thebes, which once boasted of six hundred thousand inhabitants, almost rivalled Rome in the plenitude of its power, and still bears, amidst ruins and decay, the name of the conqueror of the East." Napoleon was hardly launched into the career of conquest before he perceived the importance of the same situation; and when still struggling in the plains of Italy with the armies of Austria, he was meditating an expedition into those eastern regions where alone, in his apprehension, great things could be achieved; where kingdoms lay open to private adventure; and fame, rivalling that of the heroes of antiquity, was to be obtained. From his earliest years he had been influenced by an ardent desire to effect a revolution in the East: he was literally haunted by the idea of the glory which had been there acquired, and firmly convinced that the power of England could never be effectually humbled but by a blow at its Indian possessions. "The Persians," said he, "have blocked up the route of Tamerlane; I will discover another." It was his favourite opinion through life, that Egypt was the true line of communication with India; that it was there that the English power could alone be seriously affected; that its possession would ensure the dominion of the Mediterranean, and convert that sea into a "French Lake." From that central point armaments might be detached down the Red Sea, to attack the British possessions in India; and an entrepôt established, which would soon turn the commerce of the East into the channels which nature had formed for its reception-the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.-ALISON. 1. Emporium, from the Greek, means a place of merchandize, particularly a city or town of extensive commerce, or in which the commerce of an extensive country centres, or to which sellers and buyers resort from different countries. Such are London, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. 2. Egypt may in a double sense be said to be the birthplace of Christianity, how ? 3. Leibnitz was one of the most celebrated philosophers and mathematicians of Germany. His theological and philosophical writings are characterized by much originality, and they gave a great impulse to philosophical inquiry. He was born in 1646, and lived to the age of seventy years. See 'Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties. 4. Levant, a term applied to designate the coasts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, along the Mediterranean from Cape Matapan round the Egean Sea, Asia Minor and Syria, to the western confines of Egypt. In the middle ages the trade with these countries was almost exclusively in the hands of the Venetians, Genoese, and other Italians, who gave to them the general designation of Levante, or Eastern countries. But the term Levant being no longer vernacular in the languages of the nations now principally engaged in the trade with the countries referred to, it seems to be falling into disuse. 5. Alexandria, the most famous city and sea-port of Egypt, is here referred to. It received its name from Alexander, born 356 years before Christ, as he either founded or raised it from obscurity. Its situation was admirably chosen, and does honour to the discernment of its illustrious founder. 6. Timour or Tamerlane was one of the great conquerors of the East. For an account of his life and exploits, see Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chap. 65 EGYPT is one of the most singular countries in the world, not only from its geographical position but its physical conformation. It consists entirely of the valley of the Nile, which taking its rise in the mountains of Abyssinia, after traversing for six hundred leagues the arid deserts of Africa, and receiving the tributary waters of the Bahr-el-Abiad, perhaps the greater stream of the |