EGYPT. 141 



the expeditions of Messrs. Tyrwhitt-Drake and Palmer, who found undoubted 

 traces of rich pasturages of watered ground and of human habitation, where 

 all is now a howling waste." * Farther on, the same author remarks: " The 

 once wealthy and commercial land of Midian, now 'destitute of that whereof 

 it was once full,' has become a desolation among the nations. The cities and 

 goodly castles of the sea-board are ruinous heaps, almost level with the 

 ground. 'The Desert has resumed its rights; the intrusive hand of cultiva- 

 tion has been driven back ; the race that dwelt here have perished ; and their 

 works now look abroad in loneliness over the mighty waste.' The interior, 

 formerly so rich in oases if not in smiling field and pasture-land, has been 

 disforested to a howling wilderness ; and the area of some three thousand 

 square miles, which, thirty-one centuries ago, could send into the field 

 135,000 swordsmen, is abandoned to a few hundi-eds of a mongrel Egypto- 

 Bedawi race, half peasants, half nomads, whose only objects in life are to 

 plunder, maim and murder one another." f 



Of the very large amount of matter which could be laid before the reader 

 proving, beyond the possibility of doubt, that the climate of the region bor- 

 dering the Mediterranean on the south has undergone a marked change in 

 later geological times, and that this has been continued into the historical 

 period, only a small portion will be presented. As has already been made 

 apparent from the tenor of some of the quotations offered, the almost uni- 

 versal belief is, that the indicated change of climate has been chiefly brought 

 about by the disforesting of the country, or perhaps also in part by long- 

 continued cultivation. All, however, that is intended, in the present section, 

 is to show that a change from prosperity to stagnation, from fertility to bar- 

 renness, and from favorable climatic conditions to utter dryness, has affected 

 the whole area in question. Of the cause of this, the discussion will follow 

 farther on. 



The first quotation is from the work of C. Fraas, already cited, and it 

 relates to the proofs of a change of climate in Egypt during historical as 

 well as prehistoric times. This author thus expresses himself: " As we 

 have already repeatedly had occasion to notice what gi-eat revolutions have 

 been brought about by changes of climate, we shall find no difficulty in 

 proving this in regard to a country which has been so long inhabited as 

 Egypt. Long before our time attention was called to these changes by 



* The Gold Mines of llidian and the Ruined Midianite Cities. 2d ed. London, 1878, p. 290. 

 t 1. c., p. 391. 



