Egypt has no woods or thickets. It would hardly possess a single tree without the care of man. The few it has would soon perish if that care were intermitted. Even the palm, which we regard as the tree of the desert, cannot exist unless it be supplied with water. The species of the trees one meets with commonly in Egypt do not exceed half-a-dozen. They are the large-leaved acacia, the small-leaved thorny acacia, the tamarisk, a variety of the Indian fig, the palm, and, occasionally in Upper Egypt, the dôm palm. From this dearth of wood follow several obvious consequences, which may be worth noting. First, all the houses of the lower class, that is, of the great mass of the people of Egypt, must be built of crude, or sun-dried brick. There is no wood for posts and planks, or to burn brick for such folk as they. This obliges them to live in houses that are singularly mean; and, according to our ideas, insufficient for their purpose. They can only have a ground-floor, for no ceilings can be made without wood. Nor, for the same reason, can they have any roofs, there is no wood for rafters. Nor, if they could manage to get the rafters, would they be able to get the fuel for burning the tiles. It follows that only a part of what ought to be the roof can be covered in, and that in the rudest way, for protection against what heaven may send in the way of heat, or cold, or wet. This partial covering is very ineffectual. It consists of a few palm-leaves, or of the stalks of the millet and maize, laid horizontally from wall to wall; upon this wheat and barley straw is generally piled till it has been consumed by the donkeys, goats, camels, and buffaloes. Such is the rule; a real serviceable roof being the exception. These roofless low walls, which are the house, must also be floorless, for there is no wood either for plank-flooring, or for burning floor-bricks. Then what does duty for the floor must be dust. This makes every house a flea-preserve. A further consequence is, that within these floorless, roofless, windowless, doorless mud enclosures there can be no such thing as furniture—nothing to sit upon, nothing to stow anything away in, nothing to put anything upon; not a cupboard, a chair, or a table. But this matters little to a people who can always sit, and sleep on the dry ground; and who have nothing to stow away. Everywhere I saw men, and sometimes even women, sleeping out of doors, even in mid-winter. The same cause obliged the old Egyptians also to build, for all classes, with little, or no, wood. We have just seen that the rubbish heaps of their cities are so vast as in many instances to have completely buried the temples, which, together with many objects of Egyptian art, have thus been preserved for us. Of course this could not have occurred had wood been as largely used by them, as it is by ourselves, in domestic and public architecture. This was, also, one cause of the massiveness and grandeur of their style of architecture.