with which seamen of all periods have been prone to embellish their tales, will be found to have a very substantial substratum of fact. Those of the elder generation will doubtless recall the scheme, widely discussed in the early eighties, which was deceptively styled “the flooding of the Sahara.” Its author, Colonel François Roudaire, maintained that, by connecting the shats with the Mediterranean at a point a few miles to the north of Gabés, it would be possible to create an inland sea with an average depth of seventy-eight feet and an area of more than three thousand square miles, or nearly twice the size of Great Salt Lake in Utah. Ferdinand de Lesseps reported favorably on the proposed enterprise, which was based on the following facts. The Gulf of Gabés is separated by a sandy ridge one hundred and fifty feet high and thirteen miles across from the Shat-el-Fejej, a depression which extends into the Shat-el-Djerid which in its turn is separated by a still narrower ridge from the Shat Gharsa. The Shat Gharsa is succeeded westward by a chain of smaller depressions, and beyond them lies the Shat Melrir, whose northwestern end is not far from the Algerian town of Biskra. Were these shats connected and flooded, the Algerian hinterland would be brought into direct communication with the sea. De Lesseps estimated that the work could be completed in five years’ time at a cost of about thirty million dollars, and on the strength of this a company was formed to carry the project out. But with the death of Colonel Roudaire and the odium attaching to all enterprises with which de Lesseps was associated as a result of the Panama scandals, the scheme fell into abeyance. The company became simply an agricultural concern, devoting its energies to the creation of oases by the sinking of artesian wells. In view, however, of the pronounced interest which the French are now taking in the development of their North African possessions, a revival of the enterprise may be looked for in the not far distant future, and the lost sea the _Argo_ sailed long, long ago may again become a fact.