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APPENDIX.

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The Author again acknowledges his obligations to the able state­ments of Mr. Maclaren’s paper of 1825, connected with this subject, and now quotes that author’s opinions and those of the writer in the Foreign Quarterly Review of 1836, as to the feasibility of the pro­posed measure :—

“ Yet it is certain that the project must not only have been prac­ticable but easy, since it was accomplished in early times by men who were unprovided with many of those resources which modern art supplies. In fact, when the ground is explored the supposed difficulties vanish, and we discover that Nature has furnished such singular and unexpected facilities for establishing a water communi­cation between the two seas, that she has left little for man to do to complete her work.”— Maclaren, Jamieson’s Journal, 1825, p. 274.

“ Were European civilization and a regular government perma­nently re-established in Egypt, the undertaking would be found not only practicable but easy; so great, in fact, are the facilities which the ground presents, that though the canal (taking the magnitude of its section into account) would certainly be the largest that exists, the expense would be considerably less than that of some small works of the same kind executed in the west of Europe.”— Ibid., p. 290.

“ There is little doubt that if the French had remained in Egypt, and especially with Napoleon at the head of the government, they would have carried their project (of canals) into effect. The expense, compared with the magnificent result, is so trifling, that the wonder is that it has not been carried into effect before now either by a com­pany having the support of Mahommed Pacha, or by the Pacha on his own account .”—Foreign Quarterly Remew, 1836, p. 362.

“ A glance at the map which accompanies the Topographical Sur­vey of the French engineers is quite sufficient to demonstrate with what facility and at what moderate expense a ship’s canal might be constructed from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.”— Ibid., p. 368.