JProf. T. G. Bonneij — The Kishon and Jordan Valleys. 577 



will suffice to say (1) that all features which meet the eye are 

 indicative of subaerial erosion ; (2) that examination of its geological 

 structure shows it to have been initiated and determined by a series 

 of more or less parallel faults, which extend from soraewliere south 

 of the Taurus range to the junction of the Gulf of Akabah with the 

 Red Sea, where they run up against another and still greater system ; 

 (3) that some geologists consider the depression, now partly occupied 

 by the Dead Sea, and the elevation to the south of it, to be original 

 features produced by unequal subsidence during the process of 

 faulting, while others maintain that the Jordan once found its way 

 southward through the Gulf of Akabah and that the present con- 

 figuration of its bed is due to subsequent movements differing in 

 direction from the orig-inal. 



Fig. 1. — The JSTeighbourhood of the Esdraei^ox Gap. 



Before proceeding farther I venture to call attention to the mis- 

 application (increasing, I think) of the term ' rift valley ' to the 

 Jordan. In the strict sense of the word 'rift' (according to good 

 dictionaries of our language) such a valley must be, on any large 

 scale, a great rarity. One would not, however, quarrel much with 

 the application of the term (as by Professor Gregory in Masailand) 

 to a valley where the surface of rupture, at least on one side, was 

 still comparatively ' raw ' — unmodified by denudation. That cannot 

 be said of the Jordan, where the fault system can only be detected 

 on examination. Every feature in the landscape speaks of ordinary 

 meteoric agencies, so that the Lake of Gennesaret and the Dead Sea 

 are no more suggestive of ' rifts ' than the Lakes of Orta or of Geneva. 

 The Jordan valley, to use the accurate phrase applied to it by Suess,^ 

 is part of a ' graben versenkung.' ' Rift ' is not an accurate trans- 

 lation for 'graben'; 'trough' is far better, and as we speak of 



1 " Antlitz der Ercle," vol. i, pp. 481, 482, etc. (See p. 373 et seq. of the uewly 

 Tpublished translation by Miss & Professor SoUas.) 



