30 AGRICULTURAL AND BOTANICAL EXPLORATIONS IN PALESTINE. 



There are several sorts of chick-peas to be considered. Those of 

 southern Palestine are different from those of central Palestine, and 

 the plateaus of upper Galilee and farther north produce still differ- 

 ent types. In the southern part of the country the chick-pea does 

 well with a rainfall of 16 inches or even less. I know from personal 

 experience that these races do not grow well under irrigation. On the 

 other hand, in the north there are races growing at 4,000 to 5,000 feet 

 altitude, where the yearly rainfall is as much as 40 inches, which are 

 nevertheless liberally irrigated with water derived from the melting 

 snows of Mount Hermon. 



As there are in Palestine no bean harvesters like those used in 

 the United States, chick-peas are gathered by hand, the plants be- 

 ing pulled up by Arab women. The stems of this plant growing 

 in southern Palestine are very corrosive and attack the hands of 

 the workers. I have thought that it would be a good idea to intro- 

 duce cultivated varieties from the Crimea and the Caucasus. These 

 have erect stems, so that they can be harvested with mowers ; they have 

 scarcely any corrosive quality and could be harvested by hand, but 

 can not resist drought. The leaves and stems of the Palestine chick- 

 pea are corrosive because they are covered with crystals of oxalates 

 and other hygroscopic salts which probably absorb to some extent 

 the moisture in the air ; so, no matter how dry the night may be, a 

 field of chick-peas always glistens with drops of water in the morn- 

 ing. Is it this condensation of atmospheric humidity which enables 

 the plant to resist drought, while the Eussian plant, not provided 

 with this means for. obtaining moisture, does not grow at all or gives 

 a poor yield? 



The importance of choosing a race may be illustrated by another 

 example. Some years ago a little Jewish colony was founded south 

 of Tiberias about 650 to 800 feet below sea level. The soil was a 

 gypsum marl, the annual rainfall about 1^ feet. The Arabs had 

 cultivated only winter cereals, such as wheat and barley, asserting 

 that no summer crop could grow there without irrigation. They 

 cultivated chick-peas at Tiberias, but only in kitchen gardens. These 

 latter were sown in winter in well-sheltered places, so as to profit by 

 the winter rains. They came from Safed, scarcely 12 miles away, a 

 locality with twice as much rainfall and 3,300 feet higher in altitude. 

 I advised my brother, established in this colony, to try a variety 

 of chick-pea not so well liked as that from Safed but coming from 

 a place where the conditions were more like his own. The success 

 of the first year surpassed all expectations. The neighboring colon- 

 ists, seeing this, hastened to plant large areas with this chick-pea. I 

 feared that they were planting on too large a scale and tried to 

 prevent their doing so. But their experiment was so successful that 

 the chick-pea is now one of the common crops of this colony, and 



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