PERIODICITY OF GOOD AND BAD SEASONS. 109 
would cover at least two volumes as large as our annual one, and 
it could not therefore be included in a paper such as this, and I 
thought, perhaps I was mistaken, that I could be trusted to go 
through these records and. select the good and bad years. More- 
over, I had gone over it once before, and published it in an 
abstract. My reason for going over it again was to include all 
the additional matter. 
(2) Professor Gurney objects to my making a definite point in 
a drought, by drawing a line between the first and second year, 
and points out that it might be drawn anywhere. It may be said 
here in reply to several questions, a drought is difficult to get hold 
of, because its limits are not sharply defined like a month or a 
year in which a day comes, that you pass by the stroke of the 
pendulum to the next one, it is wanting in defined limits, often 
drought and rainfall battle for months so evenly, that it is difficult 
to draw any line, and therefore I took the middle year as the date 
of the drought ; drawing the line between the first and second 
year, simply to avoid making another line across the record. Now 
a glance at the diagram shews that out of six A droughts on 
record four lasted three years or thereabouts, and the second year 
was therefore at least the nearest to the middle of the drought. 
(3) “Periodicity cannot be shewn by picking out a drought 
here and _ there.” Certainly not, but I have not done so. It is 
stated in the text that history had been asked for data, which it 
had been in the habit of neglecting, and that this was admitted 
to be a weak point, the difficulty of obtaining the data. But itis 
@ very strong point to be able to say, as was done in the text, that 
_ all the historical data that I had been able to find in twenty years 
study, is in favour of the nineteen years’ cycle. To my mind this 
is one of the strongest proofs of the cycle, and I think in legal 
matters, when all the evidence points to one conclusion, the jury 
18 Satisfied, even if the evidence is not complete in every point. 
It it were necessary to prove constantly recurring periods in Egypt, 
there would be small hope, but is it? The records of the past — 
ae Nile levels seem to have all disappeared, except for a short recent 
