SOIL. 399 



tients, male or female, who desire a family, have this fer- 

 tilizing element copiously poured over them ; during forty 

 days their sole food must be oil, honey, and bread baked 

 without salt, and their drink water with dates steeped in it. 



Soil. Arabia presents great diversities of soil. In the 

 highlands of Yemen its general character is clay mixed 

 with sand ; but the conformation of those schistous hills 

 is unfavourable to the growth of plants. They are usual- 

 ly so craggy and precipitous as to afford neither room nor 

 aliment for vegetable productions ; the nutritive earth being 

 continually washed down by the rains. This circumstance 

 has also had the effect of rendering culture in these dis- 

 tricts extremely difficult and expensive; water must 

 be supplied either from wells, or by terraces constructed 

 along the sides of the mountains. The barren sands of 

 Hejaz resemble pulverized quartz ; the calcareous stone 

 from the hills is decomposed into a blackish earth, which 

 in time becomes fit to bear coarse vegetables. The cul- 

 tivable soil around Medina is clay, mixed with a good 

 deal of chalk and sand, and is of a grayish- white colour. 

 In other parts it consists of a yellow loam, and also of a 

 substance resembling bole-earth ; of the latter, small co- 

 nical pieces about one and a half inches long, dried in 

 the sun and suspended on a piece of riband, are sold to 

 the pilgrims, who carry them home in commemoration of 

 a miracle said to have been performed by Mohammed, 

 who cured several Bedouins of a fever by washing their 

 bodies with water in which this earth had been dissolved. 

 The plain of Tehama contains large strata of salt. Lord 

 Valentia states, that in digging a well at Mocha Mr 

 Pringle found the first eight feet to be the rubbish of 

 buildings, the next two of clay, one of sea-mud and 

 wreck, six of broken madrepores, and eleven of sand 

 and shells; thus showing that, to the depth of twen- 

 ty-eight feet, the earth was entirely composed of ma- 

 rine exuviae, with the exception of clay. Near the sur- 

 face the water was highly mephitic ; lower down it be- 

 came less brackish, and yielded only one per cent, of salt. 

 The wadis are generally formed of alluvial depositions ; 

 and are in consequence the most rich and beautiful spots 

 in the peninsula. 



The extreme variety of soils admits of a corresponding 

 diversity in the modes of cultivation as well as in the 

 kind and quantity of the crops produced. In the greater 



