neral rule, he
selected as examples the exceptional instances which had been mentioned
to him: at present wheat and barley give a yield to the husbandman of
some thirty or forty fold.

* Olivier, who was a physician and naturalist, and had
visited Egypt as well as Mesopotamia, thought that Babylonia
was somewhat less fertile than Egypt. Loftus, who was
neither, and had not visited Egypt, declares, on the
contrary, that the banks of the Euphrates are no less
productive than those of the Nile.

** Native traditions collected by Berossus confirm this, and
the testimony of Olivier is usually cited as falling in with
that of the Chaldaean writer. Olivier is considered, indeed,
to have discovered wild cereals in Mesopotamia. Pie only
says, however, that on the banks of the Euphrates above Anah
he had met with "wheat, barley, and spelt in a kind of
ravine;" from the context it clearly follows that these were
plants which had reverted to a wild state--instances of
which have been observed several times in Mesopotamia. A. de
Oandolle admitted the Mesopotamian origin of the various
species of wheat and barley.

[Illustration: 030.jpg THE GATHERING OF THE SPATHES OF THE MALE PALM
TREE]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a cylinder in the Museum at the
Hague. The original measures almost an inch in height.

"The date palm meets all the other needs of the population; they make
from it a kind of bread, wine, vinegar, honey, cakes, and numerous kinds
of stuffs; the smiths use the stones of its fruit for charcoal; these
same stones, broken and macerated, are given as a fattening food to
cattle and sheep." Such a useful tree was tended with a loving care,
the vicissitudes in its growth were observed, and its reproduction was
facilitated by the process of shaking the flowers of the male palm over
those of the female: the gods themselves had taught this artifice to
men, and they were frequently represented with a bunch of flowers in
their right hand, in the attitude assumed by a peasant in fertilizing
a palm tree. Fruit trees were everywhere mingled with ornamental
trees--the fig, apple, almond, walnut, apricot, pistachio, vine, with
the plane tree, cypress, tamarisk, and acacia; in the prosperous period
of the country the plain of the Euphrates was a great orchard which
extended uninterruptedly from the plateau of Mesopotamia to the shores
o