ALTERATIONS OF COAST LINE. 



397 



since become a region of cultivated fields. In the Gulf of Bothnia several maritime sites 

 have become inland, islands have been joined to the continent, and sunk ships have been 

 found below the soil of Pomerania. 



The chief examples of the advance of coasts are found where the sea throws up sand, 

 and large rivers bring down alluvial matter, thus, in the language of Cuvier, creating 

 provinces, and even entire kingdoms, which usually become the richest and most fertile 

 regions if their rulers permit human industry to exert itself in peace. These two causes 

 have been in operation at the mouth of the Nile, and there accessions have been made 

 to the coast of Lower Egypt, though not, perhaps, to such an extent as has been frequently 

 stated, at least within the historical period. "Egypt," says Herodotus, "like the Red 

 Sea, was once a long narrow bay, and both gulfs were separated by a small neck of land. 

 If the Nile," he adds, " should by any means have an issue into the Arabian Gulf, it 

 might choke it up with earth in twenty thousand, or even, perhaps, in ten thousand 

 years ; and why may not the Nile have filled with mud a still greater gulf in the space 

 of time which has passed before our age ? " This observation proves that it was a well- 

 ascertained fact in the time of the historian that the habitable surface of the country 

 was receiving additions from the alluvium of the river ; but the period when its delta 

 may be supposed to have been a gulf of the sea is of a date long anterior to that of the 



Bay of Alexandria. 



earliest Pharaohs of whom any record remains, in whose time the whole of Lower Egypt 

 seems to have been densely inhabited. Still there is evidence of great changes having 

 occurred in the form of the delta, and of its protrusion to some extent, within the age 

 of history. The modern Alexandria is built near the site of the ancient city, upon a 

 narrow tongue of land, which has been formed by the sand thrown up by the sea, and 

 the continual deposition of alluvial matter. Mareotis, a lake of six leagues in length, 

 in the time of Strabo, about the commencement of the Christian era, has been reduced 

 to nothing by the accumulation of debris. Thamiates, the old Damietta, was on the sea, 

 and possessed a good harbour under the Byzantine emperors, but its scanty remains are 

 now about two miles from the shore. Pharos, an island in the time of Homer, has long 

 been a part of the continent. It is certain, therefore, that within the last two thousand 

 years the coast of Lower Egypt has been advanced as well as considerably modified, but at 

 present it seems ascertained that no extension of the shore is going on, for having reached 

 the general coast-line of the Mediterranean, the current which sweeps along the north 

 of Africa receives the alluvium of the Nile, and bears it away to a foreign region. The 

 direction of this current is from the straits of Gibraltar to the shores of Syria and Asia 

 Minor, where large tracts of new land have been formed, to which the material brought 

 down by the Nile from the highlands of Ethiopia, and drifted eastward by the current, 

 may now be contributing. Since the first Greek colonists occupied the coasts of Asia 

 Minor, important additions have been made to them, the combined effect of oceanic 

 deposition and of the sediment conveyed from the interior country by numerous streams. 

 Strabo remarks upon the gain of land on the southern shore, and Captain Beaufort has 



