11 Thou also shalt be drunken: thou shalt be hid, thou also shalt seek strength because of the enemy.

12 All thy strong holds shall be like fig trees with the firstripe figs : if they be shaken, they shall even fall into the mouth of the eater. 13 Behold, thy people in the midst of thee are women the gates of thy land shall be set wide open unto thine enemies: the fire shall devour thy bars.

14 Draw thee waters for the siege, fortify thy strong holds go into clay, and tread the morter, make strong the brickkiln.

15 There shall the fire devour thee; the sword shall cut thee off, it shall eat thee up like the cankerworm: make thyself many as the cankerworm, make thyself many as the locusts.

16 Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of heaven: the cankerworm 'spoileth, and fleeth away.

17 Thy crowned are as the locusts, and thy captains as the great grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is not known where they are.

18 Thy shepherds slumber, O king of Assyria thy nobles shall dwell in the dust: thy people is scattered upon the mountains, and no man gathereth them.

19 There is no "healing of thy bruise; thy wound is grievous: all that hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hands over thee: for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?

Verse 8. Whose rampart was the sea, and her wall from the sea. The sea referred to in this passage is the river Nile, which at the present day is named el Bahr, the sea,' as its most common appellation. Dr. Robinson's Egyptian servant, who spoke English, always called it the sea.' In Egypt, the word el Bahr, implying the Mediterranean Sea, is also used for north; a north-wind is called the sea-wind,' as coming from the Mediterranean. This shews the fallacy of an argument sometimes used to prove that the Hebrew was the original language of Palestine, viz., that the word sea (D), in Hebrew, is also the Hebrew term for west. If, for this reason, the Hebrew language were original in Palestine, then also the Arabic must have been so in Egypt. In like manner, in Syria, the word Kibleh, referring to Mecca, is now universally employed for south. Robinson's Biblical Researches, i. 542.

12. If they be shaken, they shall even fall,' etc.This will appear from the fact that all figs, when ripe, fall of their own accord; a little shaking of the tree will therefore bring down many figs, when the fruit is ripe, or approaching ripeness. The firstripe figs,' that is, the early or spring figs, drop with more facility than those of summer or late autumn.

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14. Tread the morter.'-We have explained, under Ezek. xiii., that mortar is usually trodden by the feet in the East. So is the clay for making bricks; and, from the context, we should rather suppose that this is to be understood in the present passage.

17. The great grasshoppers.'-We are strongly of opinion that the construction here employed ('ai ai】 gob gobai) does not express the size of the species, but the vastness of the aggregate number. We have been furnished with some ingenious arguments to shew that the mole-cricket is to be understood. But the insect in question is described in Amos vii. 1, as very destructive to vegetable produce, while the food of the mole-cricket is chiefly composed of insects: and the fact that it does much damage to the roots of vegetables when burrowing in the earth, like the mole (whence its name), does not appear sufficiently to meet the required conditions. We are therefore more disposed to acquiesce in the conclusion

that the locust, before it is in a condition for flight, is to be understood; particularly as the ravages of the locust, in this state of its existence, could not fail to have been a matter of sad experience to the Hebrews. It will also appear from the following statement, that this part of the natural history of the locust fully corresponds to all the Scriptural intimations.

The female locust lays her eggs in autumn. She makes choice of a light earth, under the shelter of a bush or hedge, where she deposits, and carefully covers over, an oblong substance of the shape of her own body, containing a great number of eggs. These are protected by their situation from the cold of winter, and are hatched early in the spring by the heat of the sun. Consequently, in the places which have been visited by the plague of locusts, the hedges and ridges swarm with the young ones about the middle of April. In this their larva state, they differ from the perfect insect only in their colour, size, and in the absence of the wings and wing-cases, and in the incapacities which hence arise. In other respects they enjoy the same faculties, except of reproduction, as in their ultimate condition. The same observation extends to their adolescent, or nympha, condition, when the wings and wing-cases remain enclosed in covers.

Their formal and wholesale ravages begin before they are in a condition for flight; and are then indeed far more ruinous than those of the winged invaders. When they leave their native hedges, they march along, as it were, in battalions, devouring every leaf and bud as they pass, and not sparing even the bark of trees. The husbandmen, who dread this visitation above all things, have various expedients for preventing or lessening the calamity. They have much tact in discovering the places where the eggs are deposited, great quantities of which they sometimes extract and destroy: and when the evil day has actually arrived, a common plan is to dig ditches across their path, into which they fall, and are destroyed in vast numbers. Great quantities are also devoured by birds and domestic fowls. At last, when the sun has waxed warm, about the end of June, they acquire their perfect condition by the development of their wings, and 'flee away,' to inflict on other places the desolation to which they have reduced the place of their birth.

[Vv. 13, 17, 19. APPENDIX, No. 78.]

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Verse 8. Swifter than the leopards.'-The swiftness of the leopard is proverbial in all countries where it is found. This, conjoined with its other qualities, suggested the idea, in the East, of partially taming it, that it might be employed in hunting; and Harmer ingeniously conjectures that the image here employed by the prophet may have been the more familiar and striking to the people, from their having had opportunities of witnessing the prodigious feats of leopards used in the royal hunts. He would have considered this the more probable if he had known that the leopard was certainly thus employed in ancient Egypt, as appears from existing paintings. Leopards are now rarely kept for hunting in Western Asia, unless by kings and governors; but they are more common in the eastern parts of Asia. Osorius relates that one was sent by the king of Portugal to the Pope, which excited great astonishment by the velocity with which it overtook and the facility with which it killed deer and wild boars. Le Bruyn mentions a leopard kept by the pasha who governed Gaza and the other territories of the ancient Philistines, and which he frequently employed in hunting jackals. But it is in India that the cheetah, or hunting leopard, is most frequently employed, and is seen in the perfection of his power. There is an interesting account of a cheetah hunt in Forbes's Oriental Memoirs, i. 170-175, from which it appears that the cheetah, when the prey is in view, endeavours to steal undiscovered within the distance of seventy yards before it starts against the game, and seldom perseveres in the chase if it does not overtake it in a very short run, which, however, it seldom fails to do. When the cheetah resolves to exert himself, his velocity is astonishing; for although the antelope is esteemed the swiftest species of the deer, and the course generally begins at the distance of seventy or eighty yards, yet the game is usually caught, or else makes his escape, within the distance of

three or four hundred yards, the cheetah seldom running a greater distance, and in that I have measured repeated strokes of seven or eight paces. On coming up with the game, especially if a doe or fawn, it is difficult to describe the celerity with which it overthrows its prey. But the attack of an old buck is a more arduous task: his great strength sometimes enables him to make a hard struggle, though seldom with success; for although I have known a buck get loose two or three times, yet I never saw one escape after having been fairly seized.'

15. They take...them with the angle, they catch them in their net, and gather them in their dray.'-This verse is remarkable for the various modes of fishing to which it alludes; and to complete the list, the fish-spears,' mentioned by Job, might be added. There appears indeed to have been no mode of fishing now in use which was not

Christ called to follow him, and who became his apostles, were fishermen.

Angling seems to have been regarded among the Egyptians and Romans much in the same light as it is at present; and was pursued in nearly the same manner. Figures of persons angling occur frequently in the paintings of the Egyptian tombs, and on the walls of the Roman Herculaneum. From the former we have copied one specimen, shewing the mode of angling with the rod and line, and with the line alone. The difference between the two processes is well discriminated in the different attitudes of the angiers, and in the decided manner with which the one with the rod draws out his fish, as contrasted with the caution of the one who fishes with the line only. The ancient rods seem to have been shorter than the modern; and we are not aware that they were ever jointed. The lines in our specimen look very clumsy, and we do not know with what they are made. Horse-hair was anciently much employed in the lines used by anglers, as it has been since. Fishing, particularly with a line, seems to have been a favourite amusement among the ancient Egyptians. Wilkinson states that in all cases they adopted a groundbait, without any float: and that it does not appear they ever put winged insects to the hook, and still less that they had devised any process similar to our artificial fly-fishing, which is still unknown to the Egyptians. The hooks appear to have been of bronze. We may observe that the mode of angling without a rod, as shewn in our cut, is exactly the same as is still practised by the fellahs of modern Egypt.

The second cut is copied from a painting in the same tomb-at Beni-Hassan-from which the other is taken. From a comparison with other examples it appears to exhibit the common mode of fishing by a net in the river Nile. In other representations there are some variations; but none very essential. Fishing with nets seems to have been a very ancient practice in different nations. The angle was most generally employed by those who fished for sport, as at present, and the net more exclusively by those who made fishing their business. Yet the Romans used the net as well as the angle for sport, and Suetonius states that Nero was accustomed to fish with a net of gold and purple. There were a variety of nets for varied uses, for different waters, and for taking different sized fishes. Plutarch mentions corks and leaden weights as an addition which nets had received. Harmer supposes that nets were not used by the ancient Egyptians, and consequently that the word rendered nets' in the account of Egyptian fishery which we have given in Isa. xix. 8-10, must be understood of weirs or toils. He adds, 'the not using them (the nets) in Egypt, I should think must be in consequence of its being an old custom not to use them in that country. The painting from which our engraving is

copied, with others of a similar character, evince that it was an old custom to use the net in Egypt. We are of course aware that the Egyptians did use weirs and toils in their fisheries; but we do not feel assured that Scripture contains any allusion to them.

MODERN ORIENTAL NET.

The use of fish-spears, however, to which there are distinct references in the sacred writings, appears very clearly in the paintings of ancient Egypt. The spear consists of a long and stout pole terminating in two long and fine prongs single barbed, and one of them longer than the other. One of Rosellini's engravings (Monum. Civili, pl. xxv. fig. 2) shews a man standing up in his boat who has struck two fish at once with this instrument, one on each prong. These fish-spears appear to have been employed by the fishers as they gently floated down the stream in their boats.

Our present note will of course be understood as an illustration not only of the text before us, but of that in Isaiah, and others in which fishing is mentioned.