Basin irrigation, as it has been practised in Egypt for thousands of years, is the most efficacious method of utilising existing means of irrigation which the world has witnessed. It can be started by the sparsest of populations. It will support in wealth a multitude of people. King Menes made his first dyke when the Egyptian nation was in its infancy. Egypt, in Roman times, supported a population twice as dense as that of to-day. The direct labour of cultivation is reduced to an absolute minimum. Shakespeare’s genius has crystallised the system for all time:-- “They take the flow o’ the Nile By certain scales in the Pyramid; they know, By the height, the lowness, or the mean, if dearth Or foizon follow: the higher Nilus swells, The more it promises: as it ebbs, the seedsman Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain, And shortly comes to harvest.” If we cast back our view to the dawn of Egyptian history, we can picture the Nile Valley as consisting of arid plains, sand dunes, and marshy jungles, with reclaimed enclosures on all the highest lands. Every eight or ten years the valley was swept by a mighty inundation. The seeds of future success lay in the resolve of King Menes’ engineers to confine their attention to one bank of the river alone. It was the left bank of the river which history tells us was first reclaimed. A longitudinal dyke was run parallel to the stream, and cross dykes tied it to the Lybian hills. Into these basins or compartments the turbid waters of the flood were led by natural water-courses and artificial canals and allowed to deposit their rich mud and thoroughly saturate the soil; and meantime the whole of the right bank and the trough of the river itself were allowed to be swept by the floods. It must have been on this wild eastern bank that were conducted all the hippopotamus hunts which are crowded on the wall pictures of buildings of the early dynasties. In all probability, the first six dynasties contented themselves with developing the left bank of the Nile. As, however, the population increased, and with it the demand for new lands, it became necessary to reclaim the right bank of the river as well. The task now was doubly difficult, as the river had to be confined to its own trough. This masterful feat was performed by the great Pharaohs of the XIIth Dynasty, the Amenemhats and the Usartsens, who, under the name of Sesostris, usurped the place of Menes in the imagination of the ancient world. They were too well advised to content themselves with repeating on the right bank what Menes had done on the left. By suddenly confining the river they would have exposed the low-lying lands of Memphis and Lower Egypt to disastrous inundations. To obviate this, they widened and deepened the natural channel which led to the Fayoum depression in the Lybian hills, and converted it into a powerful escape to carry off the excess