During the three quarters of a century which have elapsed since the French invasion a voluminous Egyptian library has been built up, but it is almost wholly scientific, sentimental or "entertaining." Of the antiquities and the natural history of the country, the temples, mummies and crocodiles, and the humors of Fellah-life, we have been told a great deal. An account of the condition and prospects of the country from an economic point of view has remained a desideratum. This seems the less remarkable when we recall the fluctuations through which the industry, commerce and politics of Egypt have passed since Mehemet Ali seized and commenced repolishing the sceptre of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies. He and his four successors stood forth as the absolute lords of the land; but it was subject not only to the accidents of their character and policy, but to the capricious and almost always mischievous interference of their suzerain the Porte, and the often beneficial, but never quite disinterested, control of the great Christian powers. The progress of the past fourteen years has been more palpable than that of the preceding half century. The khedive Ismaal succeeded the reactionary Abbas, who stopped, and, as far as in him lay, nullified, the work of Mehemet in 1865. Since that year 971 out of 1126 miles of railway have been built; three or four hundred miles of telegraph have grown to fifty-five hundred; 112 miles of canal have been dug, and a great part of the old system deepened or restored; the great Suez Canal, additional to that, has been undertaken and completed at a net cost to Egypt of sixty-seven millions of dollars; the barrage, or damming for irrigation purposes, of the Lower Nile has been pushed at a cost of five millions; ten millions have been spent on the harbor of Alexandria, one upon lighthouses, which make the coast as safe as that of any European power, and half a million on the bridge at Cairo; schools have been multiplied, remodelled and endowed in like proportion; the judiciary has been recast with the best results, so far as time has permitted them to be shown; and the exports, excluding the transit-trade, which the opening of the Isthmus Canal has diverted from Alexandria, raised from twenty-four millions in 1866 to sixty-three millions in 1875. The cotton production, created about the beginning of the present reign by the civil war in the United States, shows a recovery and re-advance since the loss of that stimulus, shipments from Alexandria having grown from 1,288,797 quintals in 1866 to 2,615,120 in 1875. The blow dealt the commerce of that city by the transfer of the Indian trade to Port Saïd has similarly been "discounted," the mercantile sagacity of Alexander the Great continuing to assert itself in a movement of business and population which cannot fail to be largely aided by the extension of the arable area of Egypt proper and the railway development of Nubia and the Soudan.