44 THE SCRIPTURES ON A RUINED CITY. 



"But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the 

 owl also and the raven shall dwell in it." * 



" And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and 

 brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be a habita- 

 tion of dragons, and a court for owls. The wild beasts of 

 the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, 

 and the satyr shall cry to his fellows; the screech-owl also 

 shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest. There 

 shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and 

 gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be 

 gathered, everyone with her mate." f 



This falling back of the sites of populous cities and 

 cultivated grounds into what is called a state of Nature 

 furnishes the strongest evidence of the existence of a 

 permanent characteristic tendency inherent in land to 

 reveiu to its original condition, whatever that may have 

 been. If it was a forest region the tendency, therefore, 

 is for trees to spring up spontaneously; if it was a 

 heathy moorland, the tendency is for the soil to 

 produce heather ; though every trace of heather may 

 have been extirpated by generations of steady, continuous 

 tillage. 



These things can hardly fail to produce a deep im- 

 pression upon every thoughtful mind, and seem to 

 point to the conclusion that Nature has aplotted the 

 earth's surface into special regions, such as the forest, 

 the prairie, or the desert; and taking the map of the 

 world in one's hand, anybody possessing a fair know- 

 ledge of physical geography can see that these special 

 regions seem to extend in a more or less continuous 

 way, in the form of bands encircling the earth's ter- 



j- Isaiah xxxiv, part of verse 2. 



Ibid, xxxiv, verses 13, 14, and 15. 



