ment soon brings on weakness. It in general produces on man two effects distinctly characterized. It strikes him mortally with a kind of asphixy, or causes him a great debility. In the first case nature sometimes comes to the relief of the sufferer by a discharge of blood with the urine. The corpse of a person so suffocated has this peculiarity, that in a few days, or even hours, as some Arabs affirm, the limbs separate at the joints with the slightest effort; so powerful is the action of the poison even on the muscular parts, giving an astonishing activity to the progress of putrefaction. Such a corpse is reputed contagious. I know nothing so terrible as this wind: I felt it almost constantly in the Desert, bating some interruptions, one of which was for three days and three nights successively. My interpreter, Mr. Rossel, was struck by it, but escaped death by a discharge of blood. That which confirms what I have said of the separation of the limbs, is, that, having been struck by this air, I was affected for some weeks with an extreme weakness; and whenever the least warm wind blew on me, I felt a great faintness, and perceived in my joints a relaxation of the muscles.

The dangers of this wind are guarded against by inhaling the fumes of good vinegar, and by covering the face with the handkerchief. I asked the Arabs if lying down on the ground was a preservative against it: they assured me it was not. I should be inclined myself to think it prejudicial. The description which M. Volney gives of the Samieli, called in Egypt khamsin (the wind of fifty days), does not seem to me exact. What Niebuhr says of it did not strike me sufficiently to relate it here. The observations which I have now made are founded on my own experience.

The period at which the Samieli is felt, is between the middle of June and the 21st of September. It blows sometimes one, two, or three days and nights successively, and never exceeds the number of seven. Between its appearances there are sometimes intervals of from three to ten days, and even fifteen; not that the wind ceases to blow, but because having been carried in different directions, it is felt in one place after having visited another. The epoch of the Samieli coincides with the extraordinary variation of the Nile, namely, between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox.

During six months, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox, the sun traverses the ecliptic between the equator and the tropic of Capricorn; that is to say, he visits the part of the globe where there are great masses of water. His action then increases in the southern hemisphere, in proportion as, on account of its obliquity, it diminishes in the solid northern hemisphere. It is natural that the evaporations occasioned by the solar orb in this liquid hemisphere should produce that immense succession of

clouds, which dissolves in rain into the upper basin of the plateau of Africa, or is preserved in snows deposited on the heights which surround that basin, of which the Niger is the last receptacle. These accumulated rains, and the melting of the snows, are the cause of the rise of the Nile; and at the same time make the Niger communicate with that river.

It is bold in me to express, as principles, results of my geographical labours before I have submitted my whole work to the public, and awaited its fate. Requesting the patience and indulgence of my reader, I, however, venture to declare my opinions.

"The interior of every continent is a vast plateau, elevated, concave, containing by its nature many marshes and sulphureous springs, having a proclivity towards one of its sides, and the contour of which corresponds with the contours actually known of that continent. The profile of this continent is composed of as many principal terraces as there have been principal epochs in the successive subsiding of the seas." The examination of Europe and Asia has furnished me with this result. I laid it before my uncle, Count John Potocki, who approved it, and that emboldens me to publish it here.

The superior plateau of Africa, then, is a basin surrounded with eminences, the bottom of which is traversed from west to east by the Niger, and the proclivity of which is consequently in the same direction. The valley of the Nile is lateral to this direction; that is, the course of the Niger is at right angles to that of the Nile. There is between both a tract of ground, the elevation of which is such as, at the time of low water, to hinder the Niger from flowing into the Nile. The Wangara is the lake in which all the waters of the basin unite, where they stagnate and corrupt for want of a vent.

When the sun, after the autumnal equinox, sends towards this plateau the great rains and snows, the mass of the waters augmented by the rains only, is not sufficient to rise above the level. Thus this basin is filled towards the Wangara with an immense quantity of water. The season, as well as the great elevation of the plateau, then, hinder these waters, though stagnant, from corrupting and emitting their mephitic gas. After the vernal equinox, the melting of the snows being completed between the beginning of May and the summer solstice, the mass of waters rises above the level, and opens the communication between the two rivers; and it is about the summer solstice that the Nile begins to rise. This evacuation of the Wangara into the Nile would, perhaps, be more prompt but for the north winds, which retard it by driving back the waters of the Nile. It is, however, effected: the Nile receives the greenish tinge of the stagnant waters; and in the neighbourhood of the Wangara, this evacua

tion uncovers immense marshes, which were just before submerged.

The sun, returning towards the Line, occasions a great evaporation of mephitic gases, in the basin of Africa, which had been heated and prepared for this great evaporation by the passage of that luminary from the equinox to the solstice, and then by its return from the solstice to the equinox. Amidst these causes of corruption, how many insects, reptiles, and animals are there in all this marshy basin which daily perish! We know from Herodotus, that the three brothers Nasamones, after having ascended the northern rampart of this basin, had large marshes to cross, in order to reach the Niger. In the environs of the Wangara, there is formed an atmospherical stratum, heavy, offensive to the smell, and pestiferous, which is renewed in proportion as the wind has carried it away. It is a continual development of mephitic gas and noxious exhalations. Timbuctoo, and the Upper Niger, being on a higher level, the putrefied gas formed there would sink in consequence of its specific gravity, and be drawn by the current of the river, or be simply carried away by the west wind, and increase the mass which hangs over the Wangara, and would leave that city free from the scourge.

I cannot concur in the opinion of Captain Maxwell, who supposes that the Niger, after having traversed the Wangara, empties itself into the Atlantic ocean, in the 6th degree of south latitude, by the name of the Congo, or Zaire, or between the 5th and 6th degrees of north latitude, into the Gulf of Guinea. If this were so, the upper basin having a regular evacuation, the increase of the Nile and the Samieli would be inexplicable. Such, then, is the state of the interior of this basin, when sometimes the south, sometimes the west wind, begins to reign there. A high wind arriving at the superior plateau of Africa, carries away, and drives before it, the air heated by the sun, and infected by the fœtid exhalations, and bears it sometimes to Arabia, into the Hegias, where it destroys the pilgrims of Mecca, or into Syria, where I felt it. This air, thus impelled by a strong wind, either passes over the mountainous chain of Syria, or striking it at some point of its elevation, and being compressed on one side by the mountains, on the other by a column of wind, flies off at a tangent, and rises above the mountains. By its specific gravity, it would tend to fall on the reverse of the obstacle surmounted; but still impelled by the same wind, it describes a curve, and does not strike the Desert till it reaches a point at the distance of a day and a half's journey. What proves this correct is, that the coast of Syria feels only a hot wind, but never the offensive Samieli; and that the whole tract along the foot of Libanus, and Anti-Libanus, of a breadth of from fifteen to twenty leagues, is also exempt from it. Hama,

Homs, Damascus, &c. know nothing of the Samieli. The mixture of burning and cool gusts is caused by the heated mephitic gas passing first, and because the wind which impels it has not become heated. The marshes of the Wangara instantly reproduce an ardent mass of mephitic gas, which a new gust of wind takes and impels before it.

Such, I presume, is the origin of the famous Samieli. It is, I think, on the marshes of the Wangara, on the immense plateau of Africa, that its true source is to be sought.

At Bagdad this wind, coming from the north, strikes against the chain of mountains which pass near Sohneh, and which go obliquely from the north to the south-west, and meet the Euphrates to the north of that city, at the distance of three days' journey. Bagdad is at the bottom of the valley of the Euphrates; the ridge which separates that river from the Orontes, is of a great elevation; the wind cannot come there but by surmounting, gliding over the eastern slope of the valley of the Orontes, and having struck the chain in question, taking a direction analogous to its course.

POLITICAL ECONOMY.

THE Correspondence of Mons. Say, published in the late numbers of the New Monthly Magazine, is replete with interest. The wide difference of opinion between men so eminently gifted as this gentleman and Mr. Malthus, may induce a superficial observer to suspect that the source of incertitude lies in the science itself; but those who are in the habit of following literary and scientific disputes, will not fail to perceive that the minds of these philosophers have been variously acted upon by the realities of life, and that their opinions are adjusted by the nature of their sensative impressions.

Monsieur Say, by the peculiar circumstances of his country, has been made the witness of a sudden and extensive development of agricultural power, and has had ocular experience of the expansive nature of industry, when the shackles with which it has been oppressed are suddenly removed. The experience of Mr. Malthus is wholly of a contrary kind. The necessities of the times operating upon the invention and enterprising spirit of British merchants, had, indeed, developed to a great extent the manufacturing power of the country. The invention of the steam-engine, an infinity of improvements in manipulations and machinery, economies in the use of fuel, and in the application of raw materials, had enabled the manufacturer to produce, with a given capital, an enormously increased quantity of goods. During the course, however, of this long series of improvements,

at every fresh economy of time, labour, or capital, the minister had been present, and had loaded the raw material with a duty, if not equivalent to the gain, at least sufficient to absorb a large portion of it. Although, therefore, the price of certain manufactured articles may have abated to a certain extent, it has by no means come down to that natural level, which would be found in the free and unfettered operation of things.

To balance this evil, political events, for a time, opened new markets for English produce; and the monopoly of Europe compensated any disadvantages arising from taxation. But at length the continental system of Napoleon came into play; and no remote markets presented themselves to take off the glut occasioned by such a revulsion in trade. A violent and convulsive struggle succeeded, which exhausted the whole of Europe, and wasted an immensity of accumulated wealth; producing a peace concomitant with starvation and a most forced economy. With the existing taxes, to reduce the prices of English manufactures to the level of continental purses was impossible; and, even if our grateful and high-minded allies had not determined to preserve the system of exclusion commenced by Napoleon, the impoverished condition of Germany and other continental states would have produced the same results.

The phenomena peculiar to this order of things are, unemployed capital, overstocked warehouses, a suspension of manufacture, and great general misery; and such a picture, too heartrending to escape attention, might naturally cherish a presumption in favour of consumption under any circumstances, productive, or non-productive. Without asserting that Mr. Malthus has followed this train of reasoning in forming his opinions, and applied it to an abstract argument, it is not perhaps too much to imagine that such facts may have made some impression on his mind, and have prejudiced him in favour of his consuming hypothesis.

On the other hand, it should seem that Monsieur Say, not being aroused by any such striking difficulties, has abandoned himself too much to the abstract and closet methods of the French economists, in supposing that produce can engender produce to an indefinite extent. His produce seems reduced too much to the condition of counters or algebraical quantities, called into existence, and annihilated, according to the necessities of the calculation. This, indeed, he virtually admits, in his third letter in the last New Monthly Magazine, just come to hand. An indefinite increase of produce, or of artificial wants and their supply, supposes an indefinite increase of raw materials, and of workmen; but the powers of the earth's fertility are bounded, and consequently the number of manufacturers which a given number of acres can support. Thus when a sudden develop