There are certain attractions in localities that induce first settlements of man; even as peculiar conditions of country attract both birds and animals. The first want of man and beast is food: thus fertile soil and abundant pasture, combined with good climate and water communication, always ensure the settlement of man; while natural seed-bearing grasses, forests, and prairies attract both birds and beasts. The earth offers special advantages in various positions to both man and beast; and such localities are, with few exceptions, naturally inhabited. From the earliest creation there have been spots so peculiarly favoured by nature, by geographical position, climate, and fertility, that man has striven for their occupation, and they have become scenes of contention for possession. Such countries have had a powerful influence in the world's history, and such will be the great pulses of civilization,--the sources from which in a future, however distant, will flow the civilization of the world. Egypt is the land whose peculiar capabilities have thus attracted the desires of conquest, and with whom the world's earliest history is intimately connected. Egypt has been an extraordinary instance of the actual formation of a country by alluvial deposit; it has been CREATED by a single river. The great Sahara, that frightful desert of interminable scorching sand, stretching from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, is cleft by one solitary thread of water. Ages before man could have existed in that inhospitable land, that thread of water was at its silent work: through countless years it flooded and fell, depositing a rich legacy of soil upon the barren sand until the delta was created; and man, at so remote a period that we have no clue to an approximate date, occupied the fertile soil thus born of the river Nile, and that corner of savage Africa, rescued from its barrenness, became Egypt, and took the first rank in the earth's history. For that extraordinary land the world has ever contended, and will yet contend. From the Persian conquest to the present day, although the scene of continual strife, Egypt has been an example of almost uninterrupted productiveness. Its geographical position afforded peculiar advantages for commercial enterprise. Bounded on the east by the Red Sea, on the north by the Mediterranean, while the fertilizing Nile afforded inland communication, Egypt became the most prosperous and civilized country of the earth. Egypt was not only created by the Nile, but the very existence of its inhabitants depended upon the annual inundation of that river: thus all that related to the Nile was of vital importance to the people; it was the hand that fed them.