A PASSING GLANCE AT THE FLORA OF PALESTINE. 177 
brought to this region when there was a close unbroken connec- 
tion, during the later Miocene period, between it and Africa. 
This peculiar African flora is associated with a peculiar African 
fauna. The little Sun-bird and the Orange-winged Blackbird of 
tropical Africa are confined, in Palestine, exclusively to the Valley 
of the Jordan. ‘Tristram’s Night-jar, found in the Jordan Valley 
only in Palestine, has been discovered in Southern Abyssinia. In 
the Sea of Galilee, there are fishes of the Siluroid type which belong 
to a group essentially Airican, and which are almost identical 
with those occurring in Lakes Nyanza and Tanganyika. There 
are also shells of the Melanopsis type found in the Sea of Galilee, 
which occur in larger and more luxuriant forms in the great 
Equatorial lakes. The Egyptian Crocodile still lingers in the 
marshes of the Wady Zerka, or Crocodile River, which flows 
through the north-west corner of the Plain of Sharon under 
Carmel ; the little Coney, or Hyrax, of the deep ravines of the 
Wilderness of Judea, belongs to an African type, and is closely 
allied to the great African pachyderms the Hippopotamus and 
Rhinoceros ; and the marshy Lake of Merom, or Huleh, to the 
north of the Sea of Galilee, is almost choked up with enormous 
quantities of the Papyrus—not the Papyrus syriacus which occurs 
along the coast of Palestine and lines the banks of the Kishon at 
Carmel—but the true Papyrus antiquorum (the bulrush of the 
Nile), which is now to be found in that river only as far south as 
Gondokoro. All this African flora and fauna in the Valley of 
the Jordan are relics of the later Miocene period, when a most 
remarkable depression of the earth’s crust extended from beyond 
Baalbec, down through the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, 
through the Gulf of Akabah and the Red Sea, as far as the great 
lakes of Central Africa. This depression has been in parts filled 
up by volcanic elevation, and by the silt and debris of streams and 
rivers, causing the isolation of certain parts, and the formation of 
a great chain of lakes in the hollows, corresponding to the great 
chain in North America running from Winnipeg to Ontario. 
The Red Sea and the Nile Valley, Lakes Nyanza, Nyassa, and 
Tanganyika, are therefore all parts of the same geological system 
which includes the Dead Sea, the Valley of the Jordan, the Sea 
of Galilee, Lake Huleh, and the great Plain of Cele-Syria, north 
of Damascus. 
