Herodotus defines Egypt accurately as a “bequest of the river”; to the river alone it owes its fertility and its well-being. But for the flowing river, the sand of the Libyan Desert would cover that whole wrinkled valley, which, with the aid of the river, has become one of the most fertile and most thickly populated countries on the earth. At the time in which our historical information begins, we find the Lower Nile Valley inhabited by a race which, after the precedent of the Greeks, we call Egyptians. Whence the word comes, we know not; we can only say that Aigyptos in the first instance denotes the river--almost without exception in the _Odyssey_ it is thus. The word was then transferred to the country and its inhabitants, and the river received the name of Neilos (Nile), the origin of which is equally obscure. An indigenous name of the population did not exist; the Egyptians denoted themselves, in distinction from foreigners, simply as “men” (rometu). Their country, as we have already mentioned, they called Kamit, “Black Country”; the river was named Ha-pi. Semitic people called Egypt, we know not why, Mior or Musr (Hebrew Mizraim, the termination being a very common one with the names of localities). In its Arabian form, Masr, this word, at the present day, has become the indigenous name of the country and of its capital, which we call Cairo. From the name Egyptians, on the contrary, was developed the modern denotation of the Christian successors of the old indigenous population, the Copts. Controversy has been abundant and vigorous with regard to the ethnographical place of the Egyptians. While philologists and historians assume a relation with the neighbouring Asiatic races, separating the Egyptians by a sharp line of distinction from the negro race, ethnologists and biologists, Robert Hartmann pre-eminent amongst them, have defined them as genuine children of Africa who stood in indisputable physical relation with the races of the interior of the continent. And certainly in the type of the modern Egyptian there are points of contact with the typical negro, and we shall not here dispute the validity of the possible contention that a gradual transition from the Egyptians to the negroes of the Sudan can be demonstrated, and that in the Nile Valley we never are confronted with an acute ethnological contrast. We should note, however, that an acute contradiction in races is nowhere on earth perceptible. Everywhere may be found members to bridge over the gap, and the classification which we so much need does not ever start with the intermediate stages, but with the extremes in which the racial type finds its purest illustration.