INTRODUCTION. 
XXVll 
history, and such will be the great pulses of civili¬ 
zation,—the sources from which in a future, how¬ 
ever distant, will flow the civilization of the world. 
Egypt is the land whose peculiar capabilities have 
thus attracted the desires of conquest, and with whom 
the world's earliest history is intimately connected. 
Egypt has been an extraordinary instance of the 
actual formation of a country by alluvial deposit; it 
has been created by a single river. The great Sahara, 
that frightful desert of interminable scorching sand, 
stretching from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, is cleft by 
one solitary thread of water. Ages before man could 
have existed im that inhospitable land, that thread of 
water was at its silent work : through countless years 
it flooded and fell, depositing a rich legacy of soil upon 
the barren sand until the delta was created; and man, 
at so remote a period that we have no clue to an 
approximate date, occupied the fertile soil thus born of 
the river Nile, and that corner of savage Africa, rescued 
from its barrenness, became Egypt, and took the first 
rank in the earth's history. 
For that extraordinary land the world has ever 
contended, and will yet contend. 
