Nature is the husbandman who keeps this garden of the world in order, and the means and machinery by which she operates are the grand evaporating surfaces of the seas, the beams of the tropical sun, the lofty summits of the Abyssinian Mountains, and, as the product and result of all this instrumentality, great periodical inundations of summer rain.
For these or some other reasons Egypt has been occupied by man from the most remote antiquity.

The oldest records of the human race, made three thousand years ago, speak of Egypt as ancient then, when they were written.

Not only is Tradition silent, but even Fable herself does not attempt to tell the story of the origin of her population.

Here stand the oldest and most enduring monuments that human power has ever been able to raise.

It is, however, somewhat humiliating to the pride of the race to reflect that the loftiest and proudest, as well as the most permanent and stable of all the works which man has ever accomplished, are but the incidents and adjuncts of a thin stratum of alluvial fertility, left upon the sands by the subsiding waters of summer showers.
The most important portion of the alluvion of the Nile is the northern portion, where the valley widens and opens toward the sea, forming a triangular plain of about one hundred miles in length on each of the sides, over which the waters of the river flow in a great number of separate creeks and channels.