south of Petra we find the watershed of the Dead Sea and the Red Sea at a height of 787 feet above the sea level, to which the Valley of Akabah thence descends at the ancient port of Ezion-geber.

From this rough sketch of the country, we may see at once its isolation and the endless variety of its physical character. Its isolation-for, standing midway between the great empires of Assyria and Egypt, it is separated from each by the almost impassable barrier of a terrible desert the Wilderness of Paran to the south, the Desert of Assyria to the east. From the western world it was shut out by the long and almost harbourless coast of the Mediterranean; from Northern Syria, by the mountain ranges of Lebanon and Hermon. Between these, the gate of the country lay open in the long Valley of ColeSyria.

But most marked is the variety in its physical character. On the sea coast, we find the various maritime plain, some of them of surpassing richness, yielding in profusion the crops of Southern Europe, corn, millet, and abundance of fruits, with rich gardens and orchards round the cities. In these plains frost is unknown, and the harvests rarely suffer by drought, so abundant is the drainage from the hills, and so copious are the rains of autumn and winter.

The hill-country, however, from the southern cities of Judah up to the rocks of Lebanon, was that in which the population was chiefly massed. Here the physical character of the country precluded, for the most part, the corn farms of the plain, and induced the careful terracing of the hills, where the vine, the fig tree, and the olive were the staple products. In the earliest historical period of the country, the days of the patriarchs, these terraces had not yet been formed, but the primeval forest still covered the hills, affording covert to the wild beasts, and modifying the temperature of the air. During the Israelitish period, the whole of these forests gradually disappeared, giving way to the artificial culture of the terraces; but their place was taken by the evergreen olive, which still drew down from the clouds a sufficien supply of moisture. During the wars and anarchy which have desolated the East since the fall of the Roman Empire, the terraces were neglected, the olive trees were not tended, nor a succession kept up. Often they were

felled in mere wantonness or by barbaric hordes, and the terraces became naked and exposed to the full violence of the rains. The walls which supported the soil soon crumbled, and the sudden rains, washing the earth into the valleys, have left many tracts of bare rock, where formerly were oliveyards, vineyards, and gardens. Nor only so. As the country has become denuded of wood, there has been a gradual diminution of the rains, and the land has been far more exposed to periodic droughts than in the earlier periods of its history. The very labour which was expeuded on rendering it capable of maintaining a dense population has actually tended to increase its present desolation. The tillage and terrace cultivation destroyed the natural undergrowth, and, as the rocks have become denuded, there has been no soil to maintain the spontaneous growth; so that the land has not returned to the state of primæval forest, but has become artificially barren and naked.

This decadence has been the work of successive ages. It was long before all the forests were stripped for cultivation. We read, in the times of the Kings, of the Forest of Hamath and of the Wood of Ziph, in bare Judæa. Kirjath-Jearim was the city of forests,' and even on the naked hills of Benjamin there was the Forest of Bethel, the haunt of the bear and the covert of the lion. Even so late as the days of the Crusades there was a pine forest on the hills between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Now, it would be no difficult task to count the trees in Western Palestine. On Carmel alone remains any vestige of primitive natural forest, and that is fast disappearing under the axe of the Turks. Further north, a few patches of forest remain on Tabor and near Sepphurieh, but these are all till we enter the roots of Lebanon.

If, however, we wish to form a correct idea of the state of Canaan in the days of the patriarchs, we need only cross to the other side Jordan and mount the highlands of Gilead. The half nomad tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh, to whose lot this extensive region fell, never pressed by population, nor feeling the land too narrow for them, were content to cultivate only the plains and dells, and, excepting in a few cases, do not seem to have terraced the steeper hills. But, indeed, though the trans-Jordanic range is quite as high as the hills of Western Palestine, it is not so broken up. Only four

streams of any size furrow it: the Yarmuk, the Jabbok, the Callirhoe, and the Arnon. To the east, the hills gently melt away into the immense red plain which reaches the Hauran or Bashan, the farthest possession of Manasseh, after the hills of which the Assyrian desert begins. In the north, we find an open plain eastward, extending to the Lejah (Trachonitis), and farther Bashan, and westward the range is dotted with noble oaks, rather parklike than in the form of dense forest, deciduous in the lower grounds, and evergreen on the higher ranges. these roam the flocks and herds of the wandering Bedouin. Among Next, in Gilead, we come to a more densely-wooded region, a true forest in places, the tops of the higher range covered with noble pines; then a zone of evergreen oaks, with arbutus, myrtle, and other shrubs intermixed; lower down, the deciduous oak is the predominant tree, mixed with wild olive (Celtis australis), and many other semi-tropical trees, which, in their turn, yield, as we descend into the Jordan valley, to the jujube, or Zizyphus, the oleaster, and the palm. But in all these forests are open glades and dells, where corn is grown or olives planted, and the streams are fringed with oleander. Such must have been the appearance of the neighbourhood of Shechem and Bethel in the days of the patriarchs.

Farther south, the regions of Ammon and Moab are, for the most part, without forest, the trees being principally terebinth, scattered here and there over a region of fine turf, well watered, and still covered with flocks, till we reach the eastern corn plains of the Belka, now the richest district of Syria. This country, almost in its primitive state, is a picture of what Southern Judæa and the neighbourhood of Beersheba once were, before the denudation of the forests had checked the annual rainfall. There is a beauty in Gilead, a richness in Moab, and a grandeur in Bashan, which makes it hard to believe that only the narrow cleft of the Jordan valley separates them from the grey hills and naked rocks of Westeru Palestine. Though no longer do herds of wild cattle roam among the oaks, still countless flocks and herds may be seen moving down like armies to drink at the streams at sunset, with the camels, such as those of the Midianites, swarming like clouds of locusts, "rams and lambs, and goats and bullocks, all of them fatlings of Bashan." Troops of gazelle (the roebuck of Scripture)

still swarm in all the forest glades and on the plains; the antelope of various kinds, the addax and the oryx, come up from the desert; the ostrich occasionally courses over the Belka; the ibex, or wild goat, abounds in all the rocky dells of Moab; the leopard, the cheetah, and the Egyptian lynx (Felis chaus), still lurk in the woods, and may be constantly seen and tracked, though the lion is extinct while the wild boar, the wolf, and jackal are probably far more plentiful than at any former period.

Both the hill-country of Judæa and the plains of Moab melt away into the desert, where the physical features are entirely different from those of the rest of the country. On the western shores of the Dead Sea, this desert pushes up to the gorge of the Kedron, while in Philistia, and on the south-west, it can scarcely be said to begin until some distance south of the Wady es Seba. Excepting near the rare wells, there is no pasturage or fine herbage. The whole area is rock, or broken stone and shingle, rarely sand, and, for the most part, the vegetation is confined to scattered stunted bushes, sparsely sprinkled here and there, rising to the height of one or two feet, and affording food only to the camels which browse as they traverse it, and to a few antelopes, gazelle, and jerboas. But horned cattle there are none. Sheep cannot find pasturage, and only where the desert begins to merge in the low country do a few goats mingle with the camels.

Very different is the northern frontier of the land. As the southern touches a tropical desert, so the northern rises into almost arctic regions. Hermon and Lebanon, with their snowy summits almost always in sight, furnished the images which else could hardly have been familiar to the dweller by the Mediterranean-snow and vapours,'' snow like wool,' 'hoar-frost like ashes,'‘ice like morsels.' Around the snowy tops of these mountains the vapours' constantly hang, the source of moisture to the lands beneath. There is a marked contrast in the physical character of the two ranges. While Lebanon is wooded or clothed with verdure to within 1000 feet of its summit, Hermon and its cluster of satellites are for the most part bare, excepting in the thin threads of verdure which mark the course of the streams which drain them, and the forest does not climb more than a few hundred feet up the mountain-side.

As we ascend from Galilee to Lebanon, the change of the vegetation at once arrests attention. First the olive, then the fig tree disappears; the mulberry and the pear tako their place. Then the apricot is supplanted by the cherry. The vine clambers on the terraces to a greater height, the severity of the winters being compensated by the extreme heat of summer. The walnut tree flourishes, and, wherever the frosts forbid the olive, is largely cultivated for the oil of its nuts. We see in the Lebanon valleys, with their terraces, where every scrap of soil is made available for man, a specimen of the former cultivation of the Land of Israel, though the produce is different, the mulberry and the silkworm being the modern staple of these industrious mountaineers. The evergreen oak is soon lost, and the juniper, the pine, and especially the cedar, are found scattered over the highest peaks and in the roughest glens, where there is no soil for man to cultivate. But here, too, the ancient forests have disappeared, the threat of Sennacherib has been fulfilled: "I am come up to the height of the mountains, to the sides of Lebanon, and will cut down the tall cedar trees thereof, and the choice fir trees thereof" (2 Kings xix. 23). The cedars are only, for the most part, in groups, sufficient to tell what was the ancient glory of the Lebanon, but no more. The fruits, the flowers, the plants of Lebanon and Hermon, are all of an Alpine character, and so are the birds and animals. The bear still lingers among the rocks, though all but extinct in the lower country, but the other larger animals have been extirpated by the density of the population. It Is to be observed that there are many trees and plants found on the one range which do not exist on the other. Thus, the cedar is peculiar to the Lebanon, though Hermon and the Peaks of Gilead seem equally adapted for its growth; no pines are found on Hermon, while the pine of the mountains east of the Jordan is distinct from that of the Lebanon.

One more physical region remains to be noted—the Jordan valley, which has been already described. Its geological character must be reserved for a further chapter; but in its natural products it stands unique, a tropical oasis sunk in the temperate zone, and overhung by the Alpine Hermon. The course of the River Jordan, in this most unlike the Nile, hardly fertilizes anything