6. The colony is divided into the Departments of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine, the towns of the same name being capitals of these divisions. The capital, Algiers, with a population of 53,000, is finely situated on the coast of the Mediterranean. It comprises two distinct towns. The old or Arab town consists of narrow streets, crooked dirty passages, and high bare walls, with narrow grated slits serving for windows looking into courtyards. The modern or French town has fine, broad, elegant streets and boulevards built of white stone, hotels, clubs, and all the attractions of a fine European town. Of late years Algiers has been a winter resort for invalids from England. Constantine is the most important inland town, and Oran is an important sea-port in the west.

7. Iron constitutes the chief mineral wealth of Algeria, one mine alone yielding 400,000 tons of ore per annum; but lead, copper, zinc, marble, and other minerals, are widely distributed. Altogether, the forest and mineral wealth of this colony are almost inexhaustible. About two-thirds of the total commerce of Algeria is with France, and the remainder is chiefly with Spain, Turkey, and Great Britain.

8. The French occupation has done much to improve the colony. Roads have been formed, and bridges built; railways and harbours have been constructed; artesian wells have been sunk for the purpose of irrigation; marshes have been drained, and many districts hitherto almost uninhabitable, owing to malaria, have been ameliorated by the planting of the Eucalyptus, or blue gum-tree, which has the property of rapidly absorbing moisture from the soil.

9. Tunis is the smallest of the four northern states of Africa. Its area is 45,000 square miles, or one-fourth larger than Scotland. Its population, chiefly Arabs and Berbers, numbers about two millions. The country is mountainous in the north and west, and the soil is in many places fertile; but agriculture is very backward. Olive-oil is, in a special degree, a staple of the country; sheep and cattle pasture on the plains, and the horses and

dromedaries of Tunis are famous throughout North Africa. Lead, saltpetre, quicksilver, the sea-salt obtained from the lagoons, and the produce of the coral and tunny fisheries, are among the other sources of Tunisian wealth. Tunis, the capital, with a population of upwards of 100,000, is the chief town. It is connected with its port-Goletta-and with Bardo, the residence of the Bey, by short railways. Of the coast towns, Susa and Sfax are the most important. As we have seen, Tunis was, till recently, a regency of Turkey; now it is under the protection of France. The ruins of ancient Carthage are not far from the city of Tunis.

10. Tripoli is a Turkish dependency. Its southern limits are uncertain, but it probably has an area four times as large as Great Britain, whilst its population numbers but little over a million. The country is mountainous in the north-west, and in the peninsula of Barca, in the north-east; but elsewhere it is little better than a sandy desolation. There are no rivers in the country, and rain seldom falls. The heavy dews, however, in some measure compensate for the absence of rain. The chief city, Tripoli, has an important export trade in ostrich feathers, esparto grass, and wheat. The ostrich feathers are brought by caravans from the interior of the continent.

LESSON XXXVIII.

THE SAHARA.

1. The Sahara, though often looked upon as a sort of "no man's land," is in reality divided up among different tribes, and is also in part claimed by the Northern States of Africa. It comprises all the dry, almost rainless, and more or less desert, region in Northern Africa, stretching for a distance of 3,000 miles, between the Nile valley and the Atlantic; and the name, which is a corruption of the Arabic word for desert, viz, Zahrah," fairly describes it. Southwards for some

1,200 miles it stretches until it gradually merges into the better watered pasture-lands, and the tropical verdure of Soudan. It comprises between two and three millions of square miles.

2. The surface of the Sahara is not a vast plain. On the contrary, it has mountains which, though not of so great an elevation, are as extensive as those of Europe. It has enormous table-lands strewn sometimes with sharp stones, and in other places with pebbles. The mountains and the table-lands are almost entirely destitute of vegetation. It is but rarely that rain comes to refresh these arid wastes, on which the solar rays dart vertically down. There is only one season-summer, burning and merciless.

3. The northern borders of the Sahara, stretching for some 2,000 miles from the coast of Tripoli to the Senegal river and the Atlantic, and having a varying width of from 200 to 300 miles, consists of an ocean of sand blown

into heaps or "dunes." Hence it was that till recently the whole of the Sahara has been pictured as a sea of sand. The sand takes the appearance of waves, as if the ocean billows had suddenly assumed a solid form.

4. In some places there are low-lying plains or depressions—such are the marshes in the south of Tunis, and some small oases in the Libyan Desert, between Tripoli and Lower Egypt. In other places there are dry lake beds, covered with baked mud or with sheets of glistening salt.

5. But the most important feature of the Desert are the " oases," or habitable places. These are very many in number, and some of them of large extent. They are like fertile islands in oceans of sand, or vast stretches of stony plateaux. These oases are formed wherever there is sufficient water to stimulate vegetation into life, thus proving that were the Sahara to have a plentiful supply of moisture, it would soon become a fine rolling down, on which millions of cattle could graze. Owing to the general dryness of the climate, the oases are only formed at the spots where the periodical water-courses from the surrounding mountains sink into the desert, or

in the hollows, where the moisture filters down to the lowest point of the basin, as for example in the oases of the Libyan Desert.

6. Take it as a whole, the Sahara is a flat, sterile country, over which the hot winds sweep, and the mirage lures the weary travellers who cross it on camels, in order to convey goods from Timbuctoo and other barbarous states to the western and northern frontier. Such a region would hardly be habitable were it not for the cool evenings which re-invigorate the body exhausted by the heat of the day. Often, when the sun is up, the thermometer will mark, if laid on the rock or sand, a temperature very little below that of the boiling point of water, whilst at night, owing to the rapid radiation from the ground in the excessively dry atmosphere, water sometimes freezes. Between October and March there are a few showers in the north; and in August and September the tropical rains from the Indian Ocean and the coast of Guinea reach as far as some of the central hills ; but in the lowlands, in the heart of the desert, rain is often unknown for twenty years at a stretch.

7. The north-east wind is the prevailing dry wind of the Sahara; but at varying seasons hot suffocating winds blow outwards from this terrible region. These winds are called by the Arabs of the north "Simoom," meaning hot or poisonous. In Egypt the hot wind is known as "Khamsin," or fifty, because it generally blows for about fifty days from the end of April. In Tunis it is called

Sheely," and fills the air with the finest particles of sand, giving rise to diseases of the eyes. In Algeria it is called "Sirocco," and is most frequent in July. It blows northward over Italy, and melts the snows of the Alps, as the warm "Fohn" wind. In Morocco it is called "Shume," and passes over to Spain as the "Solano." In Senegambia and on the Guinea coast it is called the "Harmattan." This wind is intensely dry, and so charged with sand that steamers running along the coast north of Sierra Leone during this wind with freshly tarred or painted bulwarks become covered with