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dinate to the great dam, a smaller one, not unlike the barrage at the apex of the delta, ten miles to the north of Cairo, is to be made at Assiut. Its function will be to give a sufficient bead to the river to force the water into the system of irrigation canals that vein hundreds of thousands of acres between Assiut and Cairo. The completion of the Cairo barrage (it was begun by Mehemet Ali Pasha, from the plans of a French engineer, but not made effective until England took the country in hand) so developed cotton-culture as to add to the public revenue of the country at least $10,000,000 annually. It may safely be concluded that the Assuan reservoir is but one of a series which will in time be constructed southward to the Victoria Nyanza. The reëstablishment of khedival authority at Rhartum will determine this.

The agricultural industry that will be chiefly benefited by the Assuan reservoir and the tributary weir at Assiut is cane-culture. With Cuba's productiveness destroyed for several years, the time is considered propitious, doubtless, for doubling or trebling Egypt's output of raw sugar. The Nile cane is of such exceptional quality that much European capital has been invested in recent years in its cultivation, while crushing-factories have gone up on the river's banks as if by magic.

No subject is receiving wider attention at this time than that of territorial expansion. Great Britain, as well as France, Germany, and Russia, is yearly pressing forward its domain in Africa and Asia, preceded by the soldier or the explorer; and the fortunes of war have carried the Stars and Stripes oversea, and brought an Asiatic archipelago under administrative guidance from Washington.

But the triumph of a practical science, such as irrigation, which bears no relation to the sword or diplomacy, and turns a single acre of desert sand into a productive field, must be a thousandfold more valuable to the world than the victory of arms that merely changes a frontier or deprives a defeated na

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