But to revert to the gains of these vast hydraulic constructions. An entirely new department had been added to Egypt. It was called the Arsinoite, or Crocodilopolite nome, from Arsinöe or Crocodilopolis, its capital; and turned out, from its more thorough exposure to air than was possible in the valley of Egypt, the richest and most productive part of the kingdom. Its produce was better and more varied. For the six low-water months also during which the stored-up treasure of its great lake flowed back into the valley, it maintained the irrigation of the contiguous river-side departments. Some of the canals of India may have done as much, but no work of man was ever grander in its conception, more completely successful in all it aimed at achieving, or of greater and more undoubted utility. It must have brought into being, and kept in existence, more than 500,000 souls in the department it created, and in those whose productiveness it increased; for we are speaking of land which, we must remember, was not cultivated as our farms, or even as our gardens are, and which produced never less than two crops a year; and which not being inundated, as the land in the valley, but irrigated, and warped, regularly, and at will, all the year round, was capable of yielding three crops annually. Every square foot of ground in the Faioum, all the conditions of warmth, fertility, and moisture being always present, was kept working, at the highest power, through every hour of the twelve months. In Lake Mœris the crocodile abounded, having come in with the water. It thus became to the inhabitants of the nome the symbol of the life-giving water; and, having become to their minds the representative of that upon which everything depended, as had been the case with other symbols, it was held sacred, and eventually worshipped. Just so in the lower departments outside, where they had once had too much water, and which had not become inhabitable till the water had been drained, and dyked off, and regulated, not the crocodile, but the ichneumon, the enemy of the crocodile, had, by an analogous process, become an object of worship. They had suffered from water, and could only with difficulty keep it from overwhelming their lowlands; and so they made a symbol, for the idea of regulating water that encroached and was destructive, of that which was supposed to destroy what their neighbours had made a symbol of water itself. Here was a symbol upon a symbol. But these were people who thought in hieroglyphics; and to get to an understanding of what they meant we must translate their hieroglyphical modes of thought and expression into our own direct modes.