have asserted that those who wrote the Holy Word as God directed them were mistaken, and that the Scriptures are false. And though such objections to the Scriptures failed to prostrate the faith of Christians, many were unable to account for certain facts well sustained by an examination of the soils. Take the following as an illustration. Some years since, some skeptics discovered what they supposed to be the proof of an error in the books of Moses. The record there plainly speaks of the chief butler and the wine and grapes in Egypt. (Gen. xl.) But history and facts were against the statement. The Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote of Egypt more than four hundred years before the time of our Saviour, declares that no vines grew in Egypt; and the opinions of others added authority to that historian's statement. The soil was examined and found to be wanting in the ingredients necessary to sustain the grape; and the conclusion was that here was an error in Scripture. For two thousand years the testimony of Moses stood alone in its contradiction to the testimony of historians and the voice of the soil. But a Frenchman, (M. Costaz,) during a visit to the catacombs and caverns of an ancient city on the Nile, discovered sculptures revealing the fact that, at a time long before the birth of the Greek historian, there lived men who planted vineyards and made wine in Egypt, and had carved in the rock the history of the whole process; and, as the curiosity of antiquaries was stimulated, other places were opened, and a certain sediment was found in ancient jars; and chemists knew this sediment to be the remains of ancient wines. The first discoveries

were made at the present little Arab village of El Kâb, the ancient Elethyia, on the right bank of the Nile.* But what shall we say of those examinations of the soil that led to the decision against the growth of the vine in ancient Egypt? They were doubtless correct. But, while they had reference only to the present state of the land, they merely proved that many centuries ago the soil of Egypt had undergone a change, and that the plants which once grew there had taken their departure, or had perished, long before the time of Herodotus. Now leave. Egypt, and travel eastward and northward into Palestine, and similar evidences appear. A celebrated traveller (Robinson) discovered near Gaza an old stone wine-press. The presses were there, but the vines, as in Egypt, were gone; and the soil is of such a nature as to forbid the assertion that any vineyard for many centuries before could have flourished in that region.

Let us wander over this land of the Israelites. Some of its flowers and fruits have passed away, and others have taken their places. New flowers and new fruits grow on Mount Olivet, in Gethsemane, in Jerusalem, and throughout the country. Many plants common in some parts of the East in the time of our Saviour were evidently brought there from other lands. It is evident that even as far back as the time of Solomon, trees were transplanted and gardens adorned with plants and flowers which did not naturally belong to the soil. (Eccles. ii. 5.) And, judging from the elevated character of his reign, we might suppose that the king who was so well.

* Description de l'Égypte pendant l'Expedition de l'Armée française.

acquainted with the trees and plants of Syria (1 Kings iv. 33) would introduce into Palestine choice foreign plants to ornament the gardens of which he speaks. Josephus tells us "that the balsam for which Judea was so famous came from the Queen of Sheba, who presented a root of it to Solomon." (Antiq. lib. viii. c. 6.) Cambyses introduced the peach into Egypt, (Maillet's Letters, ix. p. 17;) and it is thought to be beyond dispute that the cassia, the orange and lemon varieties, the apricot, the moseh, (a delicious fruit, but which cannot be kept,) the pomegranate, the cous or cream-tree, are none of them natives of the country. (Pococke's Description of the East, v. 1-205.) Now look again upon the fields of the Holy Land, and another truth appears in addition to that which we have mentioned. The fruits and plants which are the same in name and kind as those of the times of the Scriptures are not the same in excellence. They are but the shadows of what they were. Changes have swept over the country which have affected the soils perhaps in some of those small but important parts of which we have spoken; and thus, while the manner of cultivation is unquestionably different from and inferior to that of former days, there are changes not attributable to cultivation alone. We have, in our wanderings over the hills of Palestine, gathered the cotton, the wheat, and the corn; we have examined the varieties of the grape, the seeds of which have been carried to other lands and planted. When we first plucked the cotton upon the hills of Samaria, its diminutive size forbade the idea that the seed would ever permit a favorable comparison between its pod and that of the cotton

of the South. And yet, under careful examination, its fibre was found to be equal, if not superior, and seeds transplanted to a healthful soil, under proper management, have yielded pods of triple size.*

Slender and feeble stalks of grain, that droop on the plains. and hills near Esdraelon or the plain of Jezrael, will spring into vigorous life and bear fourfold when taken to other places; and seeds from ordinary crops, which we found in the horsetrough of some poor Arabs, brought forth sumptuously when transplanted to our own gardens in America. Grapevine-plants from the mountains of Lebanon, which in their native hills bore bunches weighing but two to three pounds, the season after their removal to proper soils were covered with bunches the weights of which were seven to eight pounds.

Closely allied to these are other facts. The mysterious life that dwells within a seed sometimes remains within it through many ages, until all other life that existed when that seed was born has departed. I have in my possession some seeds of corn which are the produce of a few grains taken from a catacomb in Egypt. These grains were buried more than three thousand years ago, and yet when planted in the usual method proved that life was not extinct, but was simply sleeping in its silent tomb through those long ages till it was waked from its stupor by energetic influences in the earth into which the grain was put. During that time the very nature of the soil of Egypt had undergone a change, and those little seeds had outlived the ingredients of that soil in which three thousand years ago they had

* See "Palestine, Past and Present," p. 305.

been planted. The seeds, therefore, possess a permanency of character unknown even in the soil, and in each healthful grain there is a little volume of unchangeable matter, a little book of the history of vegetation, which was written three thousand years ago, and every part of which is as perfect as when it dropped from the stalk. It tells us that the soil of the country has changed, and not the seed, and that when the parent stalk was growing the soil was in the highest state of fertility. It speaks not only of the past, but, when compared with the other seed-volumes which are now found in the land, tells us that once there were vineyards, and fields of corn and wheat, which grew from the ancestors of these present families of plants, far exceeding in size and in beauty the degenerated offspring. We need nothing more than experiments upon the present grains and seeds of the land to show that there was once, many centuries past, a nobler race of plants, from which these seeds have descended.

Let us inquire into the cause of this change. An answer to this question shall include some notice of ancient gardens; but there is another answer, which cannot be founded upon any knowledge of the surface. Mr. Lyell, the geologist, has noted changes in the elevation of the land which are now in progress, affecting a large portion of the country north of Palestine. The same changes are evident north of Tyre, as shown in a recent work;* and, strange as it may seem to some, the whole land of Palestine is but the covering

*Palestine, Past and Present, p. 187.