1888. | NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 173 
in beautiful cascades down the mountain side to swell the waters 
of the Dog River, the main body of which, however, issues as a 
subterranean river from vast caverns nearly at the sea level. 
Many of these subterranean streams flow away along the level 
strata of the lower ranges of Lebanon, and break out in fountains 
at various points. Standing on one side of a valley, one can trace 
the course of such a stream on the other side of the valley by the 
line of villages, surrounded with gardens, which owe their exist- 
ence to the fountains fed by these underground rivers. In some 
cases these streams must flow for more than a hundred miles 
under the hills, before they break out in the copious fountains 
of Galilee and Samaria, which can have no source but this for 
their unfailing supply of water during the eight or nine months 
when there is no rainfall of importance. The magnitude of the 
reservoirs, which maintain the large perennial river system of 
Syria, such as the Orontes, the Leontes, the Barada, the ’Awja, 
the Jordan, the Mandhtir, the Zerqa, the Zerqa Ma‘in, the 
Arnon, the Kishon, the Awwali, the Beirtit river, the Dog river, 
the Nahr Ibrahim, the Kadisha, and the Nahr-el-Kebir, must be 
stupendous. 
North of Jebel Sunnin, the chain of Lebanon forms another 
featureless hog’s-back about 7,000 feet high, for a distance of 
about thirty miles. Opposite Tripoli, tower the loftiest peaks of 
the chain, 10,500 feet in height. At the base of the loftiest of 
all, amid a grand amphitheatre of mountains, on the moraine of 
an ancient glacier, is the historic grove of the ‘‘ Cedars of the 
Lord.” 
The summit of this lofty region of Lebanon is not honey- 
combed like Sunnin with funnel-shaped craters, but consists of a 
shingly, friable limestone, forming two parallel chains of several 
miles in length, of rounded summits five or six hundred feet in 
height, with a broad, level valley between them. The snow 
banks on the northern exposure of these peaks are of immense 
length and depth, and generally last over the whole of the long, 
hot summer, and are still unmelted when overtaken by the snows 
of another winter. The region of highest elevation is about 25 
miles in length. On the west face of its northern extremity is 
a bold escarpment, 2,000 feet in height, beetling over the plain 
of ’Akkar. 
From the lofty region just described, the chain of Lebanon 
descends gradually through the rugged mountains of Bano to 
the valley of the Nahr-el-Kebir, the ancient Hleutherus. 
The valley of the Eleutherus is a broad plain, about 1,000 feet 
above the sea at its widest point, separating the chain of Lebanon 
from the Nusairy mountains. It forms the western arm of the 
conical depression which meets at Hems, and is in my opinion 
