As Nature has thus formed, and is still forming a
delta, why should not Science create a delta, with the powerful
means at our disposal? Why should not the mud of the Nile that
now silts up the Mediterranean be directed to the barren but vast
area of deserts, that by such a deposit would become a fertile
portion of Egypt? This work might be accomplished by simple
means: the waters of the Nile, that now rush impetuously at
certain seasons with overwhelming violence, while at other
seasons they are exhausted, might be so controlled that they
should never be in excess, neither would they be reduced to a
minimum in the dry season; but the enormous volume of water
heavily charged with soil, that now rushes uselessly into the
sea, might be led throughout the deserts of Nubia and Libya, to
transform them into cotton fields that would render England
independent of America. There is no fiction in this idea; it is
merely the simple and commonplace fact, that with a fall of
fifteen hundred feet in a thousand miles, with a river that
supplies an unlimited quantity of water and mud at a particular
season, a supply could be afforded to a prodigious area, that
would be fertilized not only by irrigation, but by the annual
deposit of soil from the water, allowed to remain upon the
surface.
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