Note 348 — Chapter IV
Reading edition
Sir John F. W. Herschel, citing Talabot as his authority, Physical Geography (24).
In an elaborate paper on "Irrigation," printed in the United States Patent Report for 1860, p. 169, it is stated that the volume of water poured into the Mediterranean by the Nile in twenty-four hours, at low water, is 150,566,392,368 cubic mètres; at high water, 705,514,667,440 cubic mètres. Taking the mean of these two numbers, the average daily delivery of the Nile would be 428,081,059,808 cubic mètres, or more than 550,000,000,000 cubic yards. There is some enormous mistake, probably a typographical error, in this statement, which makes the delivery of the Nile seventeen hundred times as great as computed by Talabot, and many times more than any physical geographer has ever estimated the quantity supplied by all the rivers on the face of the globe.