The number of side canals, especially the Bahr Jusuf, which, throughout almost the whole length of the valley, is a second Nile, running parallel to the original river, must, during the historical period, by lessening the volume of water in the main channel, have very much lessened its power of shifting its course. But every one who voyages on the Nile will become aware that this power is still very great. He will often hear, and see, large portions of the incoherent bank falling into the water. In many places he will observe the fresh face of recent landslips. On the summit of these slips he will occasionally have presented to him interior sections of some of the houses of a village which is being carried away by the stream. On the fresh faces of recent slips I often observed that the stratification was unconformable, and irregular. This indicated that the sand and mud out of which the alluvium had been formed, had not been deposited at the bottom of a quiet lake-like inundation, but must have been formed at the bottom of a running stream, precisely in the same way as the sand-banks and mud-banks of the existing channel are always at the present time being formed. This irregular stratification is just what we might expect to find in the alluvium of a valley through which runs a mighty river, always restlessly shifting its channel to the right, or to the left. To experts in geology there will be but little, or nothing, new in the above given account of the process, by which the Nile formed Egypt. All river valleys have been formed, more or less, by the action of running water. It is, however, interesting both to those who are familiar, and to those who are not, with such investigations, to trace out the steps of the process, in such a manner as to be able to construct a connected view of as many of its details as can be recovered. In any case this would be interesting; but here it has an exceptional, and quite peculiar, interest, for it enables us to picture to the mind’s eye how the whole of the most historical country in the world was formed by the most historical river in the world—a physical operation, on which much that man has achieved, and, indeed, on which what man is himself at this day, very largely depended. Pictures of this kind are only one among the many helpful contributions, which science can now make to history.