We must now notice the passages which have been supposed to controvert the account we have given of the completion of the canal between the Nile and the Red Sea. The first is a passage of Pliny the Elder, which asserts that Ptolemy Philadelphus only carried the canal to the bitter lakes. "Ex quo navigabilem alveum perducere in Nilum, qua parte ad Delta dictum decurrit, sexagies et bis centena mill. passuum intervallo, (quod inter flumen et Rubrum mare interest,) primus omnium Sesostris Aegypti rex cogitavit: mox Darius Persarum: deinde Ptolemaeus sequens: qui et duxit fossam latitudine pedum centum, altitudine XL, in longitudinem XXXVII mill. D passuum usque ad Fontes amaros." It is needless to remind the reader that Diodorus and Strabo, who lived before Pliny, and had both resided long in Egypt, had seen the canal finished, and described the lock by which it communicated with the Red Sea. It appears, indeed, that the passage, as it stands, has arisen from some inadvertence of Pliny, or perhaps from some blunder of his copyists; for he contradicts his statement, that the canal of Ptolemy terminated at the bitter lakes, in a subsequent passage, in which he mentions that Philadelphus constructed the branch which reached Arsinoee, and was called the river of Ptolemy.--"Eae viae omnes Arsinoeen ducunt, conditam sororis nomine in sinu Charandra, a Ptolemaeo Philadelpho, qui primus Troglodyticen excussit, et amnem qui Arsinoeen praefluit, Ptolemaeum appellavit."[1] [1] Plinii Natur. Hist. lib. vi. Sec. 33.