This lake so abounded in fish—more than twenty species were found in it—that the daily take, during the six months the water was flowing out, was sold for a talent of silver, about two hundred pounds of our money. During the time the water was flowing in the average of the amounts of the daily sales was the third of a talent. The king gave these proceeds of the lake fisheries to the queen for pin-money. The quantity of fish taken was so great that there was at times a difficulty in pickling and drying it. Herodotus describes Lake Mœris as 450 miles in circumference. These figures are probably not those of an ignorant copyist, but what the historian himself set down in his original manuscript, for he gives the measurement in schœni as well as in stadia. The statement, of course, is an impossibility, for the true Lake Mœris could not have been more than twenty miles in length, or more than four in width. No one can suppose that Herodotus is here drawing a long bow to astonish his countrymen with a traveller’s tale. If he had been at all capable of doing anything of this kind, he never could have written a book of such value as all competent judges have ever assigned to his great work; and whatever he might have written would soon have fallen into deserved contempt. It has occurred to me that we may explain his figures by supposing that he meant them to give the circumference of the whole water-system of the Faioum. On the southern ridge of the mussel-shell he saw the great Lake Mœris; along its northern side he saw what we distinguish by the name of Birket el Keiroon; he saw the eastern extremities of the two connected by a broad canal, and in like manner their western extremities; and throughout the intervening descent he found a complete network of irrigating canals. As he makes no separate mention of the Birket el Keiroon, the probability is that he considered it to be a part of Lake Mœris. Regarding, then, the two lakes as part of the same plan, and as equally the work of man, and finding them so intimately connected with canals, he looked upon the whole as one lake enclosing the cultivated Faioum, and so he speaks of the whole under a single name, and gives a measurement of the circumference of the whole as that of Lake Mœris. What he says of the difficulty he had in understanding what had become of the earth raised in excavating the lake would apply to Birket el Keiroon, supposing it to have been artificially formed. This is almost a demonstration of his having regarded it as a part of Lake Mœris. Of course there could have been no difficulty of this kind with respect to the true Lake Mœris, for that had not been formed at all by excavation, but by dykes: it was a great dam, or series of dams, and the earth required for the construction of the dykes was all the earth that had been moved. The difficulty, therefore, here must have been just the very opposite to that which