was concentrated tlie world’s earliest history ; and
although changed in special importance, they preserve
their geographical significance to the present day.
The power and intelligence of man will have their
highest development within certain latitudes, and
the natural passions and characters ' of races will be
governed by locality and the temperature of climate.
There are certain attractions in localities that induce
first settlements of man ; even as peculiar conditions
of country attract both birds and animals. The first,
want of man and beast is food : thus fertile soil and
abundant pasture, combined with good climate and
water communication, always ensure the settlement
of man ; while natural seed-bearing grasses, forests,
and prairies attract both birds and beasts. The earth
offers special advantages in various positions to both
man and beast ; and such localities are, with few exceptions,
naturally inhabited. From the earliest creation
there have been spots so peculiarly favoured by nature,
by geographical position, climate, and fertility, that
man has striven for their occupation, and they have
become scenes of contention for possession. Such countries
have had a powerful influence in the world’s
history, and such will be the great pulses of civili-
jj zation, the sources from which in a future, however
distant, will flow the civilization of the world.
Egypt is the land whose peculiar capabilities have
thus attracted the desires of conquest, and with whom
the world’s earliest history is intimately connected.
Egypt has been an extraordinary instance of the
actual formation of a country by alluvial deposit; it
has been created by a single river. The great Sahara,
that frightful desert of interminable scorching sand,
stretching from the Eed Sea to the A tlantic, is cleft by
one solitary thread of water. Ages before man could
have existed in. that inhospitable land, that thread of
water was at its silent work : through countless years
it flooded and fell, depositing a rich legacy of soil upon
the barren sand until the delta was created; and man,
at so remote a period that we have no clue to an
approximate date, occupied the fertile soil thus born of
the river Nile, and that corner of savage Africa, rescued
from its barrenness, became Egypt, and took the first
rank in the earth’s history.
For that extraordinary land the world has ever
contended, and will yet contend.