As the river Nile, especially during the inundation, is always impregnated with alluvium, which it deposits on the soil at the rate of nearly five inches in a century, an attempt has been made by some of the sceptical school to show that man has been a denizen of this earth for many thousand years prior to the time which Scripture allows. Some excavations having been made at the suggestion of Mr. Leonard Horner — who does not appear to have assisted in person, or even to have been in the country— at the foot of the colossal statue of Ra- meses II in the area of Memphis, he concluded, from the rate at which such deposits are annually formed, that some specimens of pottery brought up from a depth of thirty-nine feet proved the existence of men upon earth long anterior to the time of Adam, observ- ing, " If there be no fallacy in my reckoning, this frag- ment of pottery, found at a depth of thirty-nine feet, must be held to be a record of the existence of man 13,371 years before A.D. 1854, In the boring at Bes-
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sousse fragments of hurned brick and pottery were brought up from a depth of fifty-nine feet." The late baron Biuisen considered that this discovery "estab- lished the fact of Egypt having been inhabited by men who made use of pottery about 11,000 years before the Christian asra" (^Egypt's Place in Univ. Hist. vol. ii, p. xii) . The most distinguished writers have, however, decided against this conclusion. Sir Gardner Wilkinson ob- serves that " as there is no possibility of ascertaining how far the statue stood above the reach of the inun- dation when first put up, we have no base for any cal- culation.'^ Champollion, the father of Egyptology, wrote, " I have demonstrated that no Egyptian monu- ment is really older than the year 2200 before our ajra." Sir Charles Lyell, in his recent work on The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, tells us that if such borings were made where an arm of the river had been silted up, the fragments of pottery and brick might be very modern ; and he considers that " in every case where we find monuments buried to a certain depth in mud, as at Memphis and Heliopolis, it represents the aera when the city fell into such decay that the ancient embankments were neglected, and the river allowed to inundate the site of the temple, obelisk, or statue." "An old indigo planter" relates his experience in a let- ter to the Athemeum (No. 1509) respecting the deposit of pottery in the bed of the Ganges : " Having lived many j^ears on its banks, I have seen the stream en- croach on a village, undermining the bank where it stood, and deposit, as a natural result, bricks, pottery, etc., in the bottom of the stream. On one occasion I am certain that the depth of the stream ^vhere the bank was breaking was above forty feet; yet in three years the current of the river drifted so much that a fresh deposit of soil took place over the debris of the village, and the ecaih was raised to a level with the old bank.'" What took place on the Ganges might have equally occurred on the Nile. The fact also that the Grecian honeysuckle was unexpectedly discovered on some of these supposed pre-Adamite fragments, together with the supposition that burned brick is a certain indication of Roman times, completely sets aside the arguments which infidelit}' would fain draw from any discovery supposed to be hostile to the supremacy of God's Word. With reference to the qualities of the water from the Nile, all antiquity acknowledges its excellence; and the Egyptians drink it without ever being injured by the quantity, except during the brief season at the com- mencement of the overflow to which we have already referred. Plutarch is unable to explain why it should be the most pleasant and nutritive water in the world, though he confesses that it was so ; and he tells us that the priests refrained from giving it to the sacred bull Apis on account of its fattening properties. It has also been held that the Nile gave fecundity, not only to the soil which was watered by it, but to all living things which partook of it; whence it happened, as some sup- pose, that the Egj'ptian women very frequently bore twins and even more. Aristotle {Hist. Anini. vii, 4) says, "they give birth to three or four children at a time, nor is this of rare occurrence." And Pliny {Nat. Hist, vii, 3) observes, " that three born at a birth is un- doubted ; though to bear above that number is consid- ered as an extraordinary phenomenon except in EyyptJ' The peculiar sweetness of the water is due to the puri- fying influence of the mud with which it is at all times charged; but which readily settles or is removed by fil- tration. So valuable are the properties of the Nile water esteemed by the inhabitants that they fretpiently preserve it in sealed vases, and drink it when it is old with the same pleasure that we do old wine. There is an anecdote of Pescennius Niger, who, when his soldiers in Egypt complained of wanting wine, exclaimed. "What! do you long for wine, when you have the water of the Nile to drink '?" It is recorded of Ptolemy Philadelpluis, king of Egypt, B.C. 285-247, when he married bis daughter Berenice to Antiochus, kinc of