soil with another element of fertility equally essential to the support of vegetation. Their vast evaporation cools the atmosphere, disturbs its equilibrium, raising alternately the stormy wind and the whispering breeze, which sweep away the noxious exhalations from the earth, and circulate health and happiness through all the habitations of man. The vapor, received from the forests chiefly, is returned in fruitful showers to feed the luxuriance of every field. Thus God in his beneficent providence 'watereth the hills from his chambers, and sendeth the springs into the valleys which run among the hills. He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man, that he may bring forth food out of the earth.'

But by the destruction of the forests, the mountains, denuded and barren, suspend their fertilizing influences on the valleys below; the showers of summer are reduced or suspended, the rains diminished, and the plains, deprived of their sources of fertility, are impoverished. The wash from the hills and mountains by winter rains and torrents, no longer a rich compound of vegetable matter, mixed with earth to fertilize the soil, becomes the waste of barren heights, overspreading with barrenness the fields which once it enriched with its alluvial deposits. The insects that prey upon the productions of the earth are multiplied, the temperature is increased, the labor of the husbandman fails, the earth refuses her increase, and whatever of fruit or grain or grass starts into life in the springing of the year, scorched by the summer's heat, brings forth little or no fruit in her

season.

"My view of the case," says Captain Allen, with reference to the present condition of Palestine, "may be thus summed up: The destruction of the primeval forests, for the wants of an improvident population, created an element of sterility, which by reaction caused depopulation.” 1

"So it has been in Palestine," says Isaac Taylor. "Once it was a land of dense timber growths, and of frequent

1 Dead Sea Expedition, Vol. II. P. 298.

graceful clusters of small trees, and of orchards, and of vineyards, which retains now only here and there a remnant of those adornments."

With this disappearance of her forests, many ages since, the climate has changed, the rain has abated, the fountains and streams have dried up, or failed, in a great measure, to yield their wonted supply; the soil has become impoverished and many portions of the country hopelessly desolate and irreclaimable. The fixed, industrious, and populous residences of other days have given place to the wretched, restless, roving Arabs who pine in want, consumed by drought, on the fields which God had blessed, and selected as the abode of his chosen, where they should neither fail to eat bread without scarceness, nor lack any thing in it. Over all this land, where "the pastures were clothed with flocks, the valleys covered over with corn, and the little hills rejoiced on every side," now roams the gaunt and hungry Arab, tending his famished flocks amid the ruins of forgotten cities.

Bare of herbage is the country round,

Nor springs nor streams refresh the ground.

Not only upon Palestine proper, but upon the Desert of Sinai also, a similar blight has fallen. The population of this desert must anciently have been numerous and powerful; compared with which the present inhabitants are but the gleanings of the summer's vintage. In the Exodus a single tribe for some time resisted the advance of two millions or more of the Israelites. In a pitched battle, with a chosen army under Joshua, the fortune of the day remained a long time doubtful. Israel and Amelek both by turns prevailed. But at present, the entire population of the pen

1 The brook Kidron must in the time of the kings of Israel have been a running stream, where now not a particle of water is found, except for a time in the season of the winter rains, 1 Kings xv. 13; 2 Kings xxiii. 6; Neh. ii. 15, etc. Dr. Barclay, in his City of the Great King, has noticed other striking failures about Jerusalem in the supply of water to that ancient city. The same is doubtless true of several other fountains and streams, now lost, of which mention is made in Jewish history.

insula is variously estimated by Burckhardt, Rüppell, and Robinson from four to seven thousand.

It may therefore be assumed as a fact that, since the period of recorded history, the population of the desert has been reduced from numerous and formidable hordes to a few petty tribes, weak and small, who have declined, age after age, with the increasing sterility of this "great and terrible wilderness."

The vast ruins scattered over this wilderness tell of its former resources and population. Dr. Robinson discovered the ruins of a single city, before unknown, which must have contained a population of more than double that of all the tribes of the desert at the present time. These ruins occupy a "level tract, of ten or twelve acres in extent, entirely and thickly covered over with confused heaps of stones, with just enough of their former order remaining to show the foundations and form of the houses and the course of some of the streets. Once, as we judged upon the spot, this must have been a city of not less than twelve or fifteen thousand inhabitants. Now it is a perfect field of ruins — a scene of unutterable desolation across which the passing stranger can with difficulty find his way."1

In this connection the ruined cities of Elusa and Eboda claim each a distinct consideration as indicative of the ancient population of the desert. The former of these, Dr. Robinson supposes, may have contained a population of fifteen or twenty thousand souls, and the latter "must have been a place of importance. But the desert has reassumed its rights; the intrusive hand of cultivation has been driven back, the races that dwelt there have perished, and their works now look abroad, in loneliness and silence, over the mighty waste."

In the desert of Sinai, again, the old city of Pharan, probably the Rephidim of the Exodus, where the Israelites encountered the Amelekites, attests the existence formerly of a numerous population. In the early centuries of the church.

1 Biblical Researches, Vol. I. p. 290.

it was the seat of an Episcopal see. The large church, crowning the summit of the hill in the valley, where Moses by his earnestness in prayer may have turned the battle against the foe, the chapel surmounting the neighboring height, and innumerable cells, caves, and hermitages on all the surrounding mountain-tops and declivities, evince the abodes of thousands of anchorets, who must have found subsistence there where now a few Bedouins of the desert

scarcely obtain a precarious sustenance. In many other places, scattered over the desert, are found ruined cloisters, hermitages, gardens, and fields, lone monuments of the people who once inhabited these parched places in the wilderness, now a salt land and not inhabited.

The mysterious Egyptian monuments of Surâbet el-Khâdim, again, evince the existence once in this "waste, howling wilderness" of an ingenious and powerful people. Here are found catacombs and hieroglyphics, and other memorials of the dead, near vast copper mines and enormous mounds of clay. These copper mines, Lepsius learns from the monuments still remaining, were worked here more than three thousand years before the Christian era. They lead us back into the gray mists of antiquity, and constrain us to contemplate with wonder and awe the stupendous remains of men who labored and died here ages before Abraham lived.

In one tract now utterly desolate, "of tolerably fertile soil, capable of tillage," were found by Dr. Robinson the remains of long ranges of low stone walls, which probably once served as the divisions of cultivated fields. Afterwards many such walls were observed which obviously were not constructed by the present race of Arab inhabitants, but must be referred back to an early period.2

All these monumental remains point unmistakably to a more numerous and cultivated race, who, in a happier age, under a more propitious climate, cultivated a soil upon which the blight of the desert had not yet fallen.

1 Lepsius's Letters, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Peninsula of Sinai, p. 300. Biblical Researches, Vol. I. p. 281.

Isaac once sowed on this land in the margin of the desert, "now barren and desolate in the extreme," and received "in the same year an hundred fold" (Gen. xxvi. 12). No husbandman could now recover from the same soil the seed

sown.

Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an ass, and he returned to the land of Egypt (Ex. iv. 20). No Arab of the desert would attempt the same journey by similar means. It is an utter impossibility except perhaps in the midst of the rainy season.

The brethren of Joseph, once and again went down from the land of Canaan into Egypt, in time of extreme drought and famine, with asses (Gen. xlii. 26; xliv. 13). Jacob with all his sons and their families went down into Egypt by the same means of conveyance, taking with them their cattle (Gen. xlv. 23; xlvi. 6). This route has in a few instances been traversed by modern tourists with horses, though not without subjecting the horse to extreme suffering for lack of water; but neither the ass nor the ox could by any possibility make the journey, which was oftentime accomplished under the pressure of a fearful famine and drought.

The flocks and the herds of the Israelites, "even very much cattle," subsisted for forty years on the desert where at the present time they could only be sustained by a continued and stupendous miracle. The children of Israel repeatedly complained for lack of water for themselves and their flocks, but only in specific localities, at different intervals; nor is there an intimation that their continuous supply was miraculous. In this connection the reflections of Dr. Robinson on this subject are peculiarly pertinent and suggestive: "How they could have obtained a sufficiency of water during their whole stay in the peninsula and their subsequent wanderings in the desert, even when want of water is mentioned, is a mystery which I am unable to solve; unless we admit the supposition that water was anciently far more abundant in those regions than at present. As we saw the peninsula, a body of two millions of men