The long-necked camels would be able to reach up to the tops of small trees, and to the lower branches of the taller ones, and, together, it seems that the goats and camels made a great difference after a while in the number of the trees. When a country is much stripped of its trees, one of the results is that less rain falls there; so it is quite sure that this stripping of the trees by the goats and camels in Egypt caused the rainfall to be less than it had been before those creatures were brought in. The country had to {14} depend more than ever, for its crops, on the overflow of the river. Of course the cutting down of the trees by carpenters with the stone or bronze axes would help to reduce the numbers, and we know that the ancient Egyptians understood the use of charcoal, which is made by burning wood. So it is easy to understand that, in a country which had no great supply of woodland to start with, what there was of it was soon almost destroyed. But until that destruction happened there was woodland enough to give shelter to numbers of wild animals. Many of the animals which the early Egyptians hunted were of kinds that are able to live in sandy places where there is very little shelter, and, as it seems, very little grass for them to eat. We find, by the old carvings and written records, that they hunted the lion, leopard, jackal, wild boars, antelopes of many kinds, wild sheep and oxen, the hippopotamus in the river, and that they caught a variety of fish in the river and in the Lake Moeris, into which water was led from the river by a canal. The making of canals, to carry the water to places where it was required, was done in very early days, and at the season of the river's overflow water was led by a canal into this big lake which acted as a reservoir, or storing place, for the water, from which they could draw it off when wanted. The crocodiles, by which the Nile was infested, were looked on as sacred. They understood the use of nets for fishing, and used nets also for surrounding four-footed animals and for catching birds. For the killing of the larger and dangerous animals they had spears of various make, and bows and arrows. It is doubtful whether they used the boomerang--that wooden, flat, curved {15} weapon, used still by the natives of Australia, which returns to the thrower after going out to a distance of more than a hundred yards. There are carved figures which look as if they might be figures of boomerangs, but they might be "throwing sticks" such as some savage people still use to give greater length of "leverage"--if you know what that means--to increase the length and force of their throw of a spear. There were immense numbers of wild-fowl about the river and the marshes. So the ancient Egyptians must have had splendid sport. [Sidenote: Domestic animals]