184 HISTORY OF 



plenty ; and, when the river does not rise to its 

 accustomed heights, they prepare for an indiffe- 

 rent harvest. It begins to overflow about the 

 seventeenth of June ; it generally continues to 

 augment for forty days, and decreases in about 

 as many more. The time of increase and de- 

 crease, however, is much more inconsiderable 

 now than it was among the ancients. Herodotus 

 informs us, that it was a hundred days rising, and 

 as many falling ; which shows that the inundation 

 was much greater at that time than at present. 

 M. Buffon* has ascribed the present diminution, 

 as well to the lessening of the Mountains of the 

 Moon, by their substance having so long been 

 washed down with the stream, as to the rising 

 of the earth in Egypt, that has for so many ages 

 received this extraneous supply. But we do not 

 find, by the buildings that have remained since 

 the times of the ancients, that the earth is much 

 raised since then. Besides the Nile in Africa, 

 we may reckon the Zara, and the Coanza, from 

 the greatness of whose openings into the sea, 

 and the rapidity of whose streams, we form an 

 estimate of the great distance from whence they 

 come. Their courses, however, are spent in wa- 

 tering deserts and savage countries, whose poverty 

 or fierceness have kept strangers away, t 



* Buffon, vol. ii. p. 82. 



[f The Nile originates, Mr Bruce informs us, in the country of the 

 Agows, about 60O yards from the small village of Geesh. From the edge 

 of the cliff of Geesh, above where the village is situated, the ground slopes 

 with a descent due north, till we come to a triangular marsh upwards of 

 86 yards broad, and 286 from the edge of the cliff, and from a priest's 

 house where Mr Bruce resided. On the east, the ground descends with a 



