hostilities with the Ethiopians and Negroes. A Phœnician expedition was directed to sail down the Red Sea and along the coast to the Land of Punt and the unknown territory beyond. According to tradition, this expedition sailed round the whole continent of Africa and passed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, reaching Egypt from that direction. Egypt, in her several thousand years of history, had been many times conquered by foreign races or the leaders of foreign armies, and had sometimes endured the domination of strangers for five hundred years at a time, though Egyptian art, tradition, and religion either survived concurrently alongside the habits and customs of the less civilised rulers, or ended by Egyptianising the stranger. But there was to come a time when the independence of Egypt was to disappear, when the Egyptian language was to cease to be dominant, when, in fact, the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Pyramids, of the Hieroglyph and the Mummy, of Ra and Aphis, Osiris, Isis, and Horus was to disappear--perhaps for ever; for the potent race that had so long held aloft a brightly-lighted lamp of civilisation has been so changed and degraded by the infusion of Persian, Arab, Greek, Italian, Negro, Circassian, Turkish, French, and Maltese blood, so often decimated by wars, famines, and diseases, and renewed with the tainted blood of mercenary armies, that, though the residuum of the population may still offer great facial resemblances to the vanished Egyptian type, the majesty of demeanour, the brilliant mental endowments of the old race have gone, and the rulers of Egypt to-day under the indifferent English are the descendants of Slavs and Turks, Arabs, Armenians, and Circassians.