[FN#16] This grain is cheaper than rice on the banks of the Nile-a fact which enlightened England, now paying a hundred times its value for “Revalenta Arabica,” apparently ignores. [FN#17] Herodotus (Euterpe) has two allusions to eye disease, which seems to have afflicted the Egyptians from the most ancient times.  Sesostris the Great died stone-blind; his successor lost his sight for ten years, and the Hermaic books had reason to devote a whole volume to ophthalmic disease.  But in the old days of idolatry, the hygienic and prophylactic practices alluded to by Herodotus, the greater cleanliness of the people, and the attention paid to the canals and drainage, probably prevented this malarious disease becoming the scourge which it is now.  The similarity of the soil and the climate of Egypt to those of Upper Sind, and the prevalence of the complaint in both countries, assist us in investigating the predisposing causes.  These are, the nitrous and pungent nature of the soil-what the old Greek calls “acrid matter exuding from the earth,"-and the sudden transition from extreme dryness to excessive damp checking the invisible perspiration of the circumorbital parts, and flying to an organ which is already weakened by the fierce glare of the sun, and the fine dust raised by the Khamsin or the Chaliho.  Glare and dust alone, seldom cause eye disease.  Everyone knows that ophthalmia is unknown in the Desert, and the people of Al-Hijaz, who live in an atmosphere of blaze and sand, seldom lose their sight.  The Egyptian usually catches ophthalmia in his childhood.  It begins with simple conjunctivitis, caused by constitutional predisposition, exposure, diet, and allowing the eye to be covered with swarms of flies.  He neglects the early symptoms, and cares the less for being a Cyclops, as the infirmity will most probably exempt him from military service.  Presently the sane organ becomes affected sympathetically.  As before, simple disease of the conjunctiva passes into purulent ophthalmia.  The man, after waiting a while, will go to the doctor and show a large cicatrix in each eye, the result of an ulcerated cornea.  Physic can do nothing for him; he remains blind for life.  He is now provided for, either by living with his friends, who seldom refuse him a loaf of bread, or if industriously inclined, by begging, by acting Mu’ezzin, or by engaging himself as “Yamaniyah,” or chaunter, at funerals.  His children are thus predisposed to the paternal complaint, and gradually the race becomes tender-eyed.  Most travellers have observed that imported African slaves seldom become blind either in Egypt or in Sind.  Few Englishmen settled in Egypt lose their sight, except they be medical men, who cannot afford time to nurse the early symptoms.  The use of coffee and of water as beverages has much to do with this.  In the days of hard drinking our Egyptian army suffered severely, and the Austrian army in Tuscany showed how often blindness is caused by importing Northern habits into Southern