The papyrus seems to me to have early come down from Ethiopia, and to have been used in Upper Egypt immediately after the disuse of hieroglyphics, and the first paper made from this plant was in Seide. By Seide was anciently meant Upper Egypt, and it is so called to this day; and the Saitic, probably the oldest language known in Egypt after the Ethiopic, still subsists, being written in the first character that succeeded the hieroglyphics in the valley or cultivated part of Egypt. Early, however, as the papyrus was known, it does not appear to me to have ever been a plant that could have existed in, or, as authors have said, been proper to the river Nile; its head is too heavy, and in a plain country the wind must have had too violent a hold of it. The stalk is small and feeble, and withal too tall, the root too short and slender to stay it against the violent pressure of the wind and current, therefore I do constantly believe it never could be a plant growing in the river Nile itself, or in any very deep or rapid river. Pliny[3], who seems to have considered and known it perfectly in all its parts, does not pretend that it ever grew in the body of the Nile itself, but in the calishes or places where the Nile had overflowed and was stagnant, and where the water was not above two cubits high. This observation, I believe, holds good universally, at least it did so wherever I have seen this plant, either in the overflowed ground in the Seide, or Upper Egypt, or in Abyssinia where it never grew in the bed of a river, but generally in some small stream that issued out of, or into some large stagnant lake or abandoned water-course. It did not even trust itself to the weight of the wave of the deepest part of that lake when agitated by the wind, but it grew generally about the borders of it, as far as the depth of the water was within a yard. Pliny says it grew likewise in Syria, and there I saw it first, before I went into Egypt; it was in the river Jordan, between the situation of the ancient city Paneas, which still bears its name, and the lake of Tiberias, which is probably the lake Pliny alludes to, where he says it grew, and with it the calamus odoratus, one of the adventitious plants brought thither formerly by curious men (as I conjecture) which now exists no more, either in Syria or Egypt. It was on the left hand of the bridge called the Bridge of the Sons of Jacob. The river where it grew was two feet nine inches deep, and it was then increased with rain. It grew likewise, as Guilandinus[4] tells us, at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. I apprehend that it was not thus propagated into Asia and Greece till the use of it, as manufactured into paper, was first known.