Abstract
THE presidential address delivered by Sir Murdoch Macdonald to the Institution of Civil Engineers at the first meeting of the session on November 1 was almost entirely devoted to a consideration of the engineering development of Egypt and the Sudan, with which his life work has been closely associated, and, in particular, to the measures taken to bring into cultivation vast areas of waste land which have lain unproductive for centuries. Of the 360,000 square miles over which the King of Egypt rules, 95 per cent is desert. The combined area of the two cultivated districts of Lower and Upper Egypt is only about 12,000 square miles, one tenth of the area of Great Britain and Ireland; and the narrow strip of cultivated land, running for some 550 miles on each side of the Nile from Cairo to Assuan, has an average width of not more than 6 miles. Referring to the geological history of the country, Sir Murdoch said that, on the supposition that the Delta of the Nile lay in an ancient bay of the Mediterranean now filled with silt, the original mouth of the river was at Cairo. The depth of silt and sand in fhat locality indicates that the river once ran at a much lower level than it does now. From records of water levels on the Roda gauge, near Cairo, extending over many hundred years, it has been deduced that the bed of the river and the general level of the cultivable land must have been raised at the rate of 1 mm. a year and the process has been going on probably for 20,000 years.
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Egypt and the Nile. Nature 130, 731 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130731b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130731b0