The cause of science has countless obligations to the cupidity of potentates and adventurers. May it not be part of the scheme of Providence, that gold is placed in the most remote and barbarous regions, as a magnet to draw thither the children of civilisation? The expedition shared in by Mr Werne is an argument in favour of the hypothesis. It originated in appetite for lucre, not in thirst for knowledge. Mehemet Ali, viceroy of Egypt, finding the lands within his control unable to meet his lavish expenditure and constant cry for gold, projected working mines supposed to exist in the districts of Kordovan and Fazogl. At heavy cost he procured Austrian miners from Trieste, a portion of whom proceeded in 1836 to the land of promise, to open those veins of gold whence it was reported the old Venetian ducats had been extracted. Already, in imagination, the viceroy beheld an ingot-laden fleet sailing merrily down the Nile. He was disappointed in his glowing expectations. Russegger, the German chief of the expedition, pocketed the pay of a Bey, ate and drank in conformity with his rank, rambled about the country, and wrote a book for the amusement and Information of his countrymen. Then he demanded thirty thousand dollars to begin the works. An Italian, who had accompanied him, offered to do it for less; mistrust and disputes arose, and at last their employer would rely on neither of them, but resolved to go and see for himself. This was in the autumn of 1838; and it might well be that the old fox was not sorry to get out of the way of certain diplomatic personages at Alexandria, and thus to postpone for a while his reply to troublesome inquiries and demands. "It was on the 15th October 1838," Mr Werne says, "that I--for some time past an anchorite in the wilderness by Tura, and just returned from a hunt in the ruins of Memphis--saw, from the left shore of the Nile, the Abu Dagn, (Father of the Beard,) as Mohammed Ali was designated to me by a Fellah standing by, steam past in his yacht, in the direction of those regions to which I would then so gladly have proceeded. Already in Alexandria I had gathered, over a glass of wine, from frigate-captain Achmet, (a Swiss, named Baumgartner,) the secret plan of the expedition to the White Stream, (Bach'r el Abiat,) and I had made every effort to obtain leave to join it, but in vain, because, as a Christian, my discretion was not to be depended upon."