1891.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 167 



celebrated English authority, Professor Sayce. I had also 

 the pleasure and profit to travel nearly all the distance up 

 the river in company with the boat of Mr. Charles Wilbour 

 of Paris, a distinguished Egyptian scholar, who, with the 

 American artist Blashfield, had a boat about the size and 

 equipment of ours. From these gentlemen I had much 

 advice, assistance and information. My purpose before this 

 assembly is to treat in a cursory manner of the agriculture 

 of a rainless climate,- with a few observations on its limited 

 botany. 



The continent of Africa, east of the Barbary States, 

 bordering on the Mediterranean Sea for a thousand miles, 

 and extending south for nearly two thousand miles, is a 

 mighty expanse of rainless desert. Groups of mountains 

 and chains of rocky promontories add to the lonely desola- 

 tion of these wastes. The atmosphere is brilliant, and the 

 winter air cool and bracing, but the eye seeks almost in 

 vain for vegetation ; there are, at wide intervals, oases where 

 water is found in wells, and there are marshes and bitter 

 lakes, but they are like little islands in a wide ocean. This 

 terrible monotony is broken by the Nile, and the prodigious 

 fertility of the narrow strip of land subject to its overflow. 



In such a country the perennial flora must be one that in 

 a state of nature withstands the months of inundation when 

 the valley is soaked with water, and that can absorb moist- 

 ure and store up strength enough to bear the complete 

 drouth of the intervening season. There is no forest, and 

 all plants that in tropical regions flourish in dim shade and 

 upon the moisture of dying wood, and all the parasitic life 

 of vine and air plants, are here unknown. The seeds of the 

 North, carried by winds or birds, obtain here no lodgment. 

 The slime of the Nile or the parched earth destroys them. 

 The small number of plants that remain may be recalled 

 without a written list. The date and doom palms, the 

 acacia, the tamarisk and the sycamore fig are the chief of 

 these, and live the better the nearer they are to the river 

 bank. With irrigation, orange, lemon, pomegranate, apri- 

 cot, almond, myrtle, jasmine, rose and similar vegetation 

 flourishes. 



Useful annuals seem to depend entirely upon the care of 



