nge, the pomegranate, and many other fruit
trees, flourished in the greatest luxuriance. Great quantity of honey
was collected. The balm-tree, which produced the opobalsamum,a great
object of trade, was probably introduced from Arabia, in the time of
Solomon. It flourished about Jericho and in Gilead."--Milman's Hist. of
Jews. i. 177.--M.]

[Footnote 83: The progress of religion is well known. The use of letter
was introduced among the savages of Europe about fifteen hundred years
before Christ; and the Europeans carried them to America about fifteen
centuries after the Christian Aera. But in a period of three thousand
years, the Phoenician alphabet received considerable alterations, as it
passed through the hands of the Greeks and Romans.]

[Footnote 84: Dion Cassius, lib. lxviii. p. 1131.]

The geographers of antiquity have frequently hesitated to what portion
of the globe they should ascribe Egypt. [85] By its situation that
celebrated kingdom is included within the immense peninsula of Africa;
but it is accessible only on the side of Asia, whose revolutions,
in almost every period of history, Egypt has humbly obeyed. A Roman
praefect was seated on the splendid throne of the Ptolemies; and the
iron sceptre of the Mamelukes is now in the hands of a Turkish pacha.
The Nile flows down the country, above five hundred miles from the
tropic of Cancer to the Mediterranean, and marks on either side of the
extent of fertility by the measure of its inundations. Cyrene, situate
towards the west, and along the sea-coast, was first a Greek colony,
afterwards a province of Egypt, and is now lost in the desert of Barca.
[851]

[Footnote 85: Ptolemy and Strabo, with the modern geographers, fix the
Isthmus of Suez as the boundary of Asia and Africa. Dionysius, Mela,
Pliny, Sallust, Hirtius, and Solinus, have preferred for that purpose
the western branch of the Nile, or even the great Catabathmus, or
descent, which last would assign to Asia, not only Egypt, but part of
Libya.]

[Footnote 851: The French editor has a long and unnecessary note on the
History of Cyrene. For the present state of that coast and country, the
volume of Captain Beechey is full of interesting details. Egypt, now an
independent and improving kingdom, appears, under the enterprising
rule of Mahommed Ali, likely to revenge its former oppression upon the
decrepit power of the Turkish empire.--M.--This note was written in
1838. The future destiny of Egypt is