518 DEPOSITS OF THE NILE. 
ernment of that country, and persevered in through later 
ages, and the waters of the annual inundation had thus been 
permanently prevented from flooding the land, it is conceiy- 
able that the productiveness of the small area of cultivable 
soil in the Nile valley might have been long kept up by 
artificial irrigation and the application of manures. But 
nature would have rebelled at last, and centuries before our 
time the mighty river would have burst the fetters by which 
impotent man had vainly striven to bind his swelling floods, 
the fertile fields of Egypt would have been converted into 
dank morasses, and then, perhaps, in some distant future, when 
the expulsion of man should have allowed the gradual restora- 
tion of the primitive equilibrium, would be again transformed 
into luxuriant garden and plough land. Fortunately, the 
saprentia Atgyptiorum, the wisdom of the Egyptians, taught 
them better things. They invited and welcomed, not repulsed, 
the slimy embraces of Nilus, and his favors have been, from 
the hoariest antiquity, the greatest material blessing that 
nature ever bestowed upon a people.* 
Deposits of the Nile. 
The Nile is larger than all the rivers of Lombardy together,t 
it drains a basin fifty, possibly even a hundred, times as exten- 
* Deep borings have not detected any essential difference in the quantity or 
quality of the deposits of the Nile for forty or fifty, or, as some compute, for 
a hundred centuries. From what vast store of rich earth does this river de- 
rive the three or four inches of fertilizing material which it spreads over the 
soil of Egypt every hundred years? Not from the White Nile, for that river 
drops nearly all its suspended matter in the broad expansions and slow 
current of its channel south of the tenth degree of north latitude. Nor does 
it appear that much sediment is contributed by the Bahbr-el-Azrek, which 
flows through forests for a great part of its course. Ihave been informed by 
an old European resident of Ezypt who is very familiar with the Upper Nile, 
that almost the whole of the earth with which its waters are charged is 
brought down by the Takazzé. 
+ From daily measurements during a period of fourteen years—1527 to 
1840—the mean delivery of the Po at Ponte Lagoscuro, below the entrance 
of its last tributary, is found to be 1,720 cubic métres, or 60,745 cubic feet, 
