The Alexandria correspondent of the Times affirms that Cap- tain
Burton's expedition to Midian has been a great success. He brought back twenty-five tons of specimens, including all the valuable metals, turquoise, alabaster, and sulphur—of which there are three great beds,—Midianite coins, inscriptions, fragments of glass and pottery, and a variety of relics from the thirty-two [ruined cities which still exist in the land. He found evidences of ancient mining operations everywhere, traces of gold so important that the correspondent reserves the facts for-the present, quartz threaded with veins of silver, yielding to a careless process fifteen per cent., and everywhere evidences of great operations anciently conducted by practised miners, probably slaves, under skilled -engineers. The people are exceedingly hostile, having been brigands, in fact, from a remote antiquity ; but the Khedive, to whom Midian belongs, intends to work his new property through European capitalists, who will pay him a royalty, and whom he will protect. This recovery of a lost province, for it amounts to that, is the best bit of work Captain Burton has done, a genuine and great result of insight into ancient history, combined with personal daring.
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