precious kind to be reared for the future. Every traveller in the valley of the Nile, who can think and feel, finds his pleasure, at the sight of the graceful form of this beneficent tree, clouded by the unwelcome recollection of the barbarous and death-dealing tax that is laid upon it. If, when the Turkish empire falls to pieces, England should shrink from undertaking, on her own sole responsibility, the protectorate of Egypt, the great powers of Europe, together with the United States of America, might, as far as Egypt is concerned, assume the lapsed suzerainty of the Porte, and become the protectors of Egypt conjointly. CHAPTER III. WHO WERE THE EGYPTIANS? Ex quovis ligno non fit Mercurius. What were the origin and affinities of the ancient Egyptians? To what race, or races, of mankind did they belong? At what time, whence, and by what route did they enter Egypt? The answer to these questions, if attainable, would not be barren. We have just been looking at the physical characteristics of the country, and noting some of the effects they must have had on the character and history of the people. The inquiry now indicated, if carried to a successful issue, will enable us, furthermore, to understand, to some extent, what were the aboriginal aptitudes the people themselves brought with them. These were the moral and intellectual elements on which the influences of nature had to act. The result was the old Egyptian. He was afterwards modified by events and circumstances, by increasing knowledge, and by the laws and customs all these led to; but the two conditions we are now speaking of were the starting-points, and which never ceased to have much influence in making this people feel as they felt, and enabling them to do what they did. To have acquired, therefore, some knowledge about them will be to have got possession of some of the materials that are indispensable for reconstructing the idea of old Egypt. We feel with respect to these old historical peoples as we do about a machine: we are not satisfied at being told that it has done such or such a piece of work; we also want to know what it is within it, which enabled it to do the work—what is its construction, and what its motive power. Six thousand years before our own time may be taken as the starting-point of the monumental and traditional history of the old monarchy. This inquiry, however, will carry us back to a far more remote past. There is but one way of treating this question: that is, to apply to it the method we apply to any question of science—to that, for instance, of gravitation, or to any other: precisely the same method applied in precisely the same way. We must collect the phenomena; and the hypothesis which explains and accounts for them all is the true one. This will act exclusively: in establishing itself it will render all others impossible.