om
the maxims followed in his country for so many thousand years, and to
permit foreigners to have access to it. Hitherto the Europeans had been
only known to the Egyptians as pirates and cannibals.

[Sidenote: Doctrine of Thales]

[Sidenote: is derived from Egypt.]

[Sidenote: Importance of water in Egypt.]

From the doctrine of Thales, it may be inferred that, though he had
visited Egypt, he had never been in communication with its sources of
learning, but had merely mingled among the vulgar, from whom he had
gathered the popular notion that the first principle is water. The state
of things in Egypt suggests that this primitive dogma of European
philosophy was a popular notion in that country. With but little care on
the part of men the fertilizing Nile-water yielded those abundant crops
which made Egypt the granary of the Old World. It might therefore be
said, both philosophically and facetiously, that the first principle of
all things is water. The harvests depended on it, and, through them,
animals and man. The government of the country was supported by it, for
the financial system was founded on a tax paid by the proprietors of the
land for the use of the public sluices and aqueducts. There was not a
peasant to whom it was not apparent that water is the first principle of
all things, even of taxation; and, since it was not only necessary to
survey lands to ascertain the surface that had been irrigated, but to
redetermine their boundaries after the subsidence of the flood, even the
scribes and surveyors might concede that geometry itself was indebted
for its origin to water.

[Sidenote: Thales asserts that water is the first principle.]

If, therefore, in any part of the Old World, this doctrine had both a
vulgar and a philosophical significance, that country was Egypt. We may
picture to ourselves the inquisitive but ill-instructed Thales carried
in some pirate-ship or trading-bark to the mysterious Nile, respecting
which Ionia was full of legends and myths. He saw the aqueducts, canals,
flood-gates, the great Lake Moeris, dug by the hand of man as many
ages before his day as have elapsed from his day to ours; he saw on all
sides the adoration paid to the river, for it had actually become
deified; he learned from the vulgar, with whom alone he came in contact,
their universal belief that all things arise from water--from the vulgar
alone, for, had he ever been taught by the priests, we should have found
trac