It seems likely that the discovery may have been due to Egyptian children. If you walk about the English country-side when the bulrushes are flourishing, it is a common sight to see children plucking the rushes and skinning them to make flowers out of the pith. The papyrus plant flourishes in the Nile water, where it roots in the mud just as the bulrush roots in the mud of English ponds. It often attains a height of 15 feet or more, and the green stem of the plant grows straight up without any joints from top to bottom. What children do in one country in one age they are likely to do in all countries in all ages. Human nature is fairly constant, and rushes growing in a river will always attract children. Probably some dark-skinned Egyptian children in the misty ages picked the skin off the papyrus reeds in order to play with the pith, which differs materially from that of the English bulrush. In the course of their childish games they may have cut the fibrous pith into layers and spread them on a rock, just as children spread out things to play at shops, whereupon the hot sun of Egypt would quickly dry the fragments. Perhaps the father, interested in the games of his children, seized on this curious substance and was struck by its fine texture and smooth surface. Experimenting for himself out of sheer curiosity, he may have cut some strips of pith and joined them in a simple manner by pressing the edges with his finger while they were still moist with sap, thus making the first sheet of papyrus. Whatever its origin, papyrus in time was made by cutting the pith into thin strips, placing the strips so that one edge overlapped another, and pressing them all together. When they dried, the overlapped edges adhered, and the result was a continuous sheet of white material on which it was possible to work with a brush and a reed pen. The papyrus reed still flourishes in the Upper Nile as it did in ancient days. Indeed it has become rather a curse to the country, and a few years ago it threatened to choke the river completely. It was such a menace, owing to its interfering with the flow of water on which the whole life of Egypt depends, that drastic steps, costing a huge sum of money, had to be taken to clear the upper reaches. Steamers slowly ate their way into it for hundreds of miles, clearing channels and destroying the sudd, as it is called, the sudd which is largely composed of the papyrus on which the ancients relied for their writing materials! Nowadays, the sudd is being compressed into blocks and used as fuel, so the papyrus is still serving humanity.