UNWRITTEN HISTORY. 33 i 



the ancient records of Egypt which lends support to such an hy- 

 pothesis. 



But we are indebted to Dr. Leith Adams for proof that the Nile, 

 between the first and the second cataracts, once stood very much more 

 than twenty-five feet above its present level. From Assouan to Derr, 

 in fact, he observed abundant patches and continuous terraces of allu- 

 vium, containing shells of the same kinds of fresh-water mollusks as 

 those which now inhabit the Nile, one hundred to one hundred and 

 twenty feet above the highest level now reached by its waters ; and 

 he concludes that " the primeval Nile was a larger and more rapid 

 river than it is now." I am disposed to think that the " primeval " 

 Nile was so, but I question whether these terraces were made by the 

 river in its youth. I see no reason why they should not be affairs of 

 a geological yesterday say, a mere twenty or thirty thousand years 

 ago. 



There can be no reasonable doubt of the correctness of the view 

 first, so far as I am aware, distinctly enunciated by M. Louis Lartet,* 

 that the whole of the principal valley of the Nile has been excavated 

 by the river itself. I am disposed, for my own part, to think that the 

 Nile might have done this great work if the mass of its waters had 

 never been much greater than now. And, with respect to the innu- 

 merable lateral ravines which debouch into the main valley, I think it 

 -would not be safe to affirm that they could not have been excavated 

 by the rains, even if the meteorological conditions of the country had 

 never been very widely different from what they are now. 



But, in some parts of Lower Egypt, and in the peninsula of Sinai, 

 many of the dry wadys exhibit such massive deposits of more or less 

 stratified materials, that it is hardly credible they can have been formed 

 under anything like existing conditions. Indeed, in some localities, 

 very competent observers have considered that there is good evidence 

 of th'j former existence of glaciers in the valleys of Sinai. And it is 

 well worthy of consideration whether, as Fraas and Lartet have sug- 

 gested, these deposits were not contemporaneous with the so-called 

 glacial epoch, when the climate of Northern Europe resembled that of 

 Greenland, and when the Mediterranean covered the Sahara and 

 washed the western flanks of the Libyan range. 



Under such changed conditions, Egypt must have been one of the 

 wet countries of the world, instead of one of the driest ; and, as there 

 need have been no diminution in the bulk of water poured in by the 

 White and Blue Niles, the accumulation of water in the valley of 

 EgyP^ partly in virtue of its own rainfall, and partly by the dimi- 



* u 



Essai sur la Geologie de la Palestine et des Contrees avoisinantes, telles que 

 l'Egypte et l'Arabie," 1869. The Rev. Barham Zincke, in his interesting work " Egypt 

 of the Pharaohs," 1871, has expressed similar conclusions ; and I may say that they 

 forced themselves on my own mind in the course of my journey to the first cataract in 

 1872. 



