QUANTITY OF WATER APPLIED. 375 
a garden, but lias unquestionably produced extensive climatic 
cliange.* 
The fields of Egypt are more regularly watered than those 
of any other country bordering on the Mediterranean, except 
the rice grounds in Italy, and perhaps the mcvrcite or winter 
meadows of Lombardy; but irrigation is more or less employed 
throughout almost the entire basin of that sea, and is every¬ 
where attended with effects which, if less in degree, are anal¬ 
ogous in character to those resulting from it in Egypt. In 
general, it may be said that the soil is nowhere artificially 
watered except when it is so dry that little moisture would be 
evaporated from it, and, consequently, every acre of irrigated 
ground is so much added to the evaporable surface of the 
country. When the supply of water is unlimited, it is allowed, 
after serving its purpose on one field, to run into drains, canals, 
or rivers. But in most regions where irrigation is regularly 
employed, it is necessary to economize the water; after pass¬ 
ing over or through one parcel of ground, it is conducted to 
* Ritter supposes Egypt to have been a sandy desert when it was first 
occupied by man. “ The first inhabitant of the sandy valley of the Nile was 
a desert dweller, as his neighbors right and left, the Libyan, the nomade 
Arab, still are. But the civilized people of Egypt transformed, by canals, 
the waste into the richest granary of the world ; they liberated themselves 
from the shackles of the rock and sand desert, in the midst of which, by a 
wise distribution of the fluid through the solid geographical form, by irri¬ 
gation in short, they created a region of culture most rich iu historical 
monuments .”—Einleitung zur allgemeinen vergleichenden Geographie, pp. 
165, 166. 
This view seems to me highly improbable; for though, by canals and 
embankments, man has done much to modify the natural distribution of 
the waters of the Nile, and possibly has even transferred its channel from 
one side of the valley to the other, yet the annual inundation is not his 
work, and the river must have overflowed its banks and carried spon¬ 
taneous vegetation wfith its waters, as well before as since Egypt was first 
occupied by the human family. There is, indeed, some reason to suppose 
that man lived upon the banks of the Nile when its channel was much 
lower, and the spread of its inundations much narrower than at present; 
but wherever its flood reached, there the forest would propagate itself, 
and its shores are much more likely to have been morasses than sands. 
