says:--

"He commences with the land of Egypt. In the East great rivers are the
parents of civilized nations. A great river, which by its deposit forms
a long valley and a broad delta of rich alluvial soil in the midst of
deserts, was the parent, the nourisher, and the god of the oldest
civilized nation of the earth. The Nile is Egypt; the Egyptians were
those who lived below the cataracts and drank of the Nile. Above the
cataracts they pushed their arms into Ethiopia, and left there the
monuments of their dominion. To the west they were at once defended and
confined by a desert impassable to armies, but which the oasis rendered
passable to the caravan. On the north was an almost harborless sea. On
the east was another desert, through which roads led to the ports of the
Red Sea and the mines of Sinai. On the north-east the Arabian desert
formed an imperfect barrier. It was traversed by the hosts of Sesostris
and Sheshonk, of Nebuchadnezzar and Cambyses, and across its sands Egypt
communicated commercially and politically with the other seats of
ancient civilization which, broken by the recurring desert, formed an
irregular chain from Philistia to China.

"Of the singular productions of Egypt, the hippopotamus, the crocodile,
the ibis, the papyrus, we need not speak. There were few beasts of
chase, and the Egyptian conquerors did not begin like those of central
Asia by being mighty hunters. It was a land of corn, and of the vine, of
fruit trees, and all herbs. The nations sought its granaries in famine;
the Israelites in the wilderness thirsted for the cooling vegetables of
its gardens. Fish abounded in the Nile, waterfowl in the marshes. Nature
yielded freely, but perhaps for that very reason the mind of man was
less exercised and less active. And the unvarying landscape, the
unchanging sky, the small number and unpoetic or even grotesque forms of
the plants and animals, may partly account for the lack of imagination
evinced by the most formal and most stationary of nations, scarcely
excepting the Chinese.

"Who and whence were the Egyptians? This question Mr. Kenrick has to
ask, and, like others, to leave unanswered. This is the secret which the
grave of the Pharaohs will not yield. Physiology supplies no clue. The
mummy cases, the paintings and sculptures, depict a race short, slight,
with low foreheads, high cheek bones, long eyes, hair now crisp now
curled, and a complexion which the conventionality of the painte