in which either agriculture or manufactures were cultivated and improved to any considerable
degree. Upper Egypt extends itself nowhere above a few miles from the Nile; and in Lower
Egypt, that great river breaks itself into many different canals, which, with the assistance of a
little art, seem to have afforded a communication by water-carriage, not only between all the
great towns, but between all the considerable villages, and even to many farm-houses in the
country, nearly in the same manner as the Rhine and the Maese do in Holland at present. The
extent and easiness of this inland navigation was probably one of the principal causes of the
early improvement of Egypt.

The improvements in agriculture and manufactures seem likewise to have been of very great
antiquity in the provinces of Bengal, in the East Indies, and in some of the eastern provinces
of China, though the great extent of this antiquity is not authenticated by any histories of
whose authority we, in this part of the world, are well assured. In Bengal, the Ganges, and
several other great rivers, form a great number of navigable canals, in the same manner as the
Nile does in Egypt. In the eastern provinces of China, too, several great rivers form, by their
different branches, a multitude of canals, and, by communicating with one another, afford an
inland navigation much more extensive than that either of the Nile or the Ganges, or, perhaps,
than both of them put together. It is remarkable, that neither the ancient Egyptians, nor the
Indians, nor the Chinese, encouraged foreign commerce, but seem all to have derived their
great opulence from this inland navigation.

All the inland parts of Africa, and all that part of Asia which lies any considerable way north
of the Euxine and Caspian seas, the ancient Scythia, the modern Tartary and Siberia, seem, in
all ages of the world, to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we
find them at present. The sea of Tartary is the frozen ocean, which admits of no navigation ;
and though some of the greatest rivers in the world run through that country, they are at too
great a distance from one another to carry commerce and communication through the greater
part of it. There are in Africa none of those great inlets, such as the Baltic and Adriatic seas in
Europe, the Mediterranean and Euxine seas in both Europe and Asia, and the gulfs of Arabia,
Persia, India, Bengal, and Siam, in Asia, to carry maritime commerce into the interior parts of