PALESTINE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 543, 19 February 1913, Page 7

PALESTINE.

1- ■ IN ITS SPACIOUS TIMES AND TO-DAY. People rarely remember what a little place the Holy Lrnd is. "The recorded life of .Jesus," Prof. Huntington tells us in his "Palestine and Its Transformations," "was limited to a district sca-ccly larger than that which cities like Chicago reckon as suburban. In his' whole life after infancy he never departed from home further than a Londoner whose journeys did not extend beyond Southampton cn the one side and Ipswich on the other. Yet.in that space how vastly greater the variety. . . . the traSickin'.: Phoenicians of the coasts, the provincial Jews of Galilee, the Greek cities oi tho Decapolis,, the despised Samaritans, the exclusive Jews of Judea, and over all the Roman and his legions, reeruited from the world. A man who travelled where Jesus did became cosmopolitan in spite of himself."

How disastrously Palestine has changed, since those spacious days

-.>. ay be realised when one loo's at the ruined sites and desert lands here once stood populous; citbs.

owadays Tiberias is the only town or, the shores of the lake of Gennesaret, for the squalid little haunt of Mejdel, once Magdala, need not be reckoned. Yet "once the shores of •he sea of Galilee were with almost continuous cities, villages, and gardens," and instead of SCCO or 3000 inhabitants the population must have numbered from 100,000 to 150,>OO. "The Galilee of Christ's day," is Prof. Huntington remarks, "must have been a paradise compared with that of to-day."

The explanation is lack c.f water, and the same cause has operated all over Palestine: to turn the smiling .alleys into a desert and the 'f.i'.hiands into an uncultivable wil"-;n-'--s. sot \hat there is too li'.t'-c n< n jverywhsre, for thej anma! ;ivor;>s.c at Jerusalem is 261n., much J ,h: :a <. as Loudon, but the i.?.'n '.o--rs v.t the.wrong time. Cf iha 2i.in ,21 i tall in four winter men hs ; a'.cl if -,he "former" and the "latter" rains ire insufficient or come a little totlate or too early, respectively, the crops fail altogether. A very slight fall in average temperature and a small extension of the rainy period would make all the difference.—"Athenaeum."