prevailing winds at sea in driving in the
waters at their mouths, which were, nevertheless, not subject to
inundations like the Nile.

The second theory was, that the Nile took its rise, not, like other
rivers, in inland lakes, or among inland mountains, but in some remote
and unknown ocean on the other side of the continent, which ocean the
advocates of this theory supposed might be subject to some great annual
ebb and flow; and from this it might result that at stated periods an
unusual tide of waters might be poured into the channel of the river.
This, however, could not be true, for the waters of the inundation were
fresh, not salt, which proved that they were not furnished by any ocean.

A third hypothesis was, that the rising of the water was occasioned by
the melting of the snows in summer on the mountains from which the
sources of the river came. Against this supposition Herodotus found more
numerous and more satisfactory reasons even than he had advanced against
the others. In the first place the river came from the south--a
direction in which the heat increased in intensity with every league, as
far as travelers had explored it; and beyond those limits, they supposed
that the burning sun made the country uninhabitable. It was preposterous
to suppose that there could be snow and ice there. Then, besides, the
Nile had been ascended to a great distance, and reports from the natives
had been brought down from regions still more remote, and no tidings had
ever been brought of ice and snow. It was unreasonable, therefore, to
suppose that the inundations could arise from such a cause.

These scientific theories, however, were discussed only among
philosophers and learned men. The common people had a much more simple
and satisfactory mode of disposing of the subject. They, in their
imaginations, invested the beneficent river with a sort of life and
personality, and when they saw its waters rising so gently but yet
surely, to overflow their whole land, leaving it, as they withdrew
again, endued with a new and exuberant fertility, they imagined it a
living and acting intelligence, that in the exercise of some mysterious
and inscrutable powers, the nature of which was to them unknown, and
impelled by a kind and friendly regard for the country and its
inhabitants, came annually, of its own accord, to spread over the land
the blessings of fertility and abundance. The mysterious stream being
viewed in this light, its won