140 THE DESICCATION OF LATER GEOLOGICAL TIMES. 



excess than now. As I have said, the denudation of Armenia accounts per- 

 haps for the destruction of Irak. In any case it is certain, that at the pres- 

 ent moment the full energies of the existing population are required to 

 preserve their footing, not to make new conquests on the river. Now, as I 

 am writing, Lower Mesopotamia is expecting famine from the failure of the 

 Tis^ris, for not an acre of wheat can be sown without its floodins." * 



The following is quoted from Dr. C. Fraas : " The most fruitful land of 

 antiquity was, as is well known, the region bordering on the Lower Eu- 

 phrates and Tigris, and particularly that called in later times Mesopotamia. 

 As the sacred writings of the Hebrews have assigned this as the country 

 from which the founder of their religion emigrated, it is an attractive sub- 

 ject to compare its former with its present fruitfulness. As Eichter says, 

 the land of great canals is now desert and barren, without settlements, 

 and a dried-up wilderness. The once most fertile alluvial bottoms, inter- 

 sected by numerous lines of canals and ditches, are now covered with a 

 growth of the plants peculiar to a saline soil, and all this where once was 

 the ' garden of the world.' " f 



Professor E. H. Palmer gives a number of quotations from the Jewish 

 sacred books, which, he says, " tend to confirm the supposition that the Pe- 

 ninsula [of Sinai] was better supplied with water at the time of the Exodus." t 

 He considers it certain that there was, at that time, a large population in 

 and near Sinai ; and among them were colonies of Eg3'ptian miners, " whose 

 slag-heaps and furnaces are to be seen in every part of the Peninsula. These 

 must have destroyed many miles of forest in order to procure the fuel neces- 

 sary for carrying on their operations ; nay more, the children of Israel could 

 not have passed through without consuming vast quantities of fuel too. 

 But if forest after forest disappeared in this way, if population dwindled 

 down to a few non-agricultural tribes, and cultivation were neglected, then 

 the rain that falls so seldom would no longer stay to fertilize the land, but 

 in an unimpeded torrent would find its way to the sea; a burning summer 

 sun would soon complete the work, and a few ages would make the Penin- 

 sula of Sinai what we see it now." 



Captain Burton says : " That great changes for the worse have taken place 

 in the Sinaitic Peninsula, and in the Negeb, or South Country, we know from 



* A Pilgrimage to Nejd, Vol. II. p. 276. 



+ Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte beider, von C. Fraas. Landshut, 1847, 

 p. 20. 



t The Desert of the Exodus. 2 vols. London, Vol. I. p. 25. 



