144 THE DESICCATION OF LATER GEOLOGICAL TIMES. 



the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, gives his attention espe- 

 cially to the increasing dryness of that region, referring repeatedly to the 

 proofs of a change of climate in those countries during the historic period. 

 Of the many quotations, in point, which might be made from his work,* 

 the following is selected : " What a difference between this idea of life 

 [Lebensanschauung], held in ancient Egypt, taken from the City of the Dead 

 of Saqara and the pyramids, and the idea of life drawn from the royal 

 graves of Qiirna and Medinet Habu. It is hardly possible to say which 

 required the longer time, the changes of popular belief [Volksglaube] or 

 the introduction and dissemination of new domestic animals. The camel 

 is still wanting even on the walls of the temples of Thebes, and had cer- 

 tainly not been introduced at the time of the founding of that city, for there 

 was no desert then. Magnificent buildings, such as those in the Assassi 

 Mountain, or in Denderah, and the giant structures of the world, on which 

 we gaze, at the present time, with the dee^iest feeling of our own insignifi- 

 cance [Armseligkeit] — such buildings were not placed away to one side in 

 the desert, whei-e they could only be reached with difficulty and danger. 

 Thousands of walls were not covered, from floor to roof, with inscrip- 

 tions, paintings, and scul2)tures, that they might remain unseen in the 

 night of the grave ; but that the writing might be read, and the works of 

 art inspected. The remains of both the most ancient, and the ancient^ 

 Egypt speak as loudly of the changed climate of the Nile-lands as do the 

 gravels [Gertille] in the Wadys of the Libyan desert of former floods of 



water, where now, year out and year in, no drop of water ever flows 



An intellectual activity like that of the times of the Greeks, when Alex- 

 andria was the centre of all the arts and sciences, a true world's university, 

 with the richest library on earth ; or as that which existed from the times 

 of the Platonists up to the first centuries of the Christian era, when the 

 greatest thinkers of the church — such as the Gnostic Origen — developed 

 their philosophical-religious systems, — such a movement of thought de- 

 mands, as an absolute necessity, a different climate, and a moister air, than 

 that now prevailing in Egypt. On the present soil of the Nile-land never 

 again will any philosophical system be developed ; and no power in the 

 world could cause an University to arise there which should have even the 

 most distant resemblance to an European one." 



* Aus dem Orient ; Geologische Beobachtungen am NU, auf der SiDai-Halbiiisel, uud in Syrien. Stuttgart, 

 1867. 



