Under this system, the people being merely tenants of the 

 Pharoah, paying the annual tax of one-fifth part of their 

 increase, it was not difficult for a wise and beneficient ruler, 

 as this Pharoah appears to have been, acting under the 

 guidance of a trusted official, who had evidently acquired 

 exact knowledge of the time and duration of dry and wet 

 seasons, to make such provision as to enable a dense popu- 

 lation to exist, during the long periods of drought which 

 we now know must have occurred in the past. Let us, 

 therefore, hope that the exact knowledge which Joseph 

 undoubtedly possessed of the periodicity of weather, from a 

 close study of the Nile records, has at last been restored to 

 us after a lapse of over 3,600 years, and that we shall be 

 enabled to similarly forecast the seasons, and make as wise 

 provision as he did, during the years of plenty against the 

 years of drought, which have so long afflicted us, but whose 

 alternating periods have, up to the present time, been as 

 illusive as a will-o-the-wisp. 



David's Dronght.-H Samuel xxi, 1. "Then there was a 

 famine in the days of David three years, yur aftrr year; an. I 

 David ftujuired of the Lord. . . ." 



The marginal date is B.C. 1021, which is 081 years, or 

 four cycles of 171 years, after B.C. 1705, the fourth year of 

 the famine of Pharoah and Joseph, or seventeen cycles of 

 171 years before A.D. 1886. The diagram shows that there 

 was a drought on the Nile in A.D. 1886 and two previous 

 years, and no doubt Palestine, in which David was living, 

 was similarly affected. 



Elijah's Drought.-[Marginal date B.C. 910.] I Kings XVII, 

 1. "And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, 

 said unto Ahab, as the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom J 

 stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according 

 to my word." 



(7) "And it came to pass after a while, that the brook dried up, 

 because there had been no rain in the land." 



