that the hail, by meeting with no resistance, as from the flax and barley, did them no harm.

The plantations of rice are kept almost constantly under water; and therefore the larger crops of it are produced near Dami-ata and Rozetto, where the ground, being low, is more easily overflowed than those portions of it, which lie higher up the river. Rice, or oryza, as we learn from Pliny (l. xviii. c. 17.) was the olyra of the ancient Egyptians.

Besides the use that is commonly made of barley to feed their cattle, the Egyptians, after it is dried and parched, make a fermented intoxicating liquor of it, called bouzah, the same probably with the avos gives of the ancients. This is very copiously drank by the lower rank of people, and might be one species of the siccar *, or strong drink, which is mentioned in Scripture; for spirits drawn by the alembic, were not, we may presume, of this antiquity.

Such vegetable productions as require more moisture than what is occasioned by the inundation, are refreshed by water drawn out of the river by instruments, and lodged afterwards in capacious cisterns. Archimedes' skrew† seems to have been the first that was made use of upon these occasions; though at present the inhabi

tants

St Jerome (Epist. ad Nepotianum) acquaints us that the si cera was made of several things, as of barley, ripe grapes, figs, siliquæ, cornel-berries, &c. Omne quod inebriare potest, sice'ra dicitur. Id. de Nom. Hebr. Vid. Cant. viii. 2. of pomegranate wine.

+ Diod. Sic. 1. i. p. 21.

tants serve themselves either with leathern buckets, or else with a sakiah, as they call the Persian wheel, which is the general, as well as the most useful machine. However, engines and contrivances of both these kinds, are placed all along the banks of the Nile, from the sea quite up to the cataracts; and as these banks, i. e. the land itself, become higher in proportion as we advance up the river, the difficulty of raising water be comes likewise the greater.

When therefore their various sorts of pulse, safranon (or carthamus), musa, melons, sugar canes, &c. all which are commonly planted in rills, require to be refreshed, they strike out the plugs that are fixed in the bottoms of the cisterns, and then the water gushing out, is conducted from one rill to another by the gardener, who is always ready, as occasion requires, to stop and divert the torrent, by turning the earth against it with his foot, and opening at the same time with his mattock a new trench to receive it. This method of conveying moisture and nourishment to a land rarely or ever refreshed with rain, is often alluded to in the Holy Scriptures, where also it is made the distinguishing quality betwixt Egypt and the Land of Canaan.. "For "the land," says Moses to the children of Israel, Deut. xi. 10, 11. "whither thou goest in to pos

sess it, is not as the land of Egypt, from "whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy ἐσ seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a gar"den of herbs; but the land whither ye go to

possess

"possess it, is a land of hills and vallies, and "drinketh water of the rain of heaven."

Of the Egyptian Animals.

Ir, from this short account of their vegetable productions, we enquire after their animals, the hippopotamus is what the present race of Egyptians are not at all acquainted with. Nay, the very crocodile, or timsah, as they call it, so rarely appears below the cataracts, that the sight of it is as great a curiosity to them as to the Europeans. In like manner the ibis, that was once known to every family, is now become exceedingly rare; neither could I learn that it was any where to be met with. By the skeleton of one of these birds embalmed, which I brought from Egypt, the upper part of the bill (for the lower is mouldered away) is shaped exactly like that of the numenius, or curlew: The thigh bone is five, and the tibia six inches long; each of them smaller and more delicate than in the heron; and consequently the crus rigidum, which is attributed to it by Tully*, seems to be without foundation. The feathers are so scorched, by the composition they were embalmed with, that they have lost their original colour, which, according to Plutarch, should be both black and white as in the ages. That part of the rump, or region

πελαργός.

of

* Ibes maximam vim serpentium conficiunt, cum sint aves excelsæ, cruribus rigidis, corneo próceroque rostro. De nat. Deor. 1.i. p. 210. Ed. Lamb.