xamination of the geological character of the plain.[A]

Looking from our hill-top southwestwardly across the plain, the eye is
carried between two low ranges of hills into a valley which seems a
continuation of this plain. Here runs the Iardanos, along which,
according to Homer, the Cydonians dwelt. But it is now in no point of
its course nearer than ten miles to Canea. This discrepancy troubled the
early travellers, who were finally inclined to solve the riddle by
supposing Cydonia to have been a district, and not a city merely. But
study the plain a little, or Spratt's chart of it, and we shall see that
from that far-off river-bed an almost unbroken and very gentle
inclination leads through the plain, by the rear of the city, to the bay
of Suda, a considerable ridge rising between it and the sea.

Suppose the mountains reclothed with forests, the hillsides pierced with
perennial springs, and the flowing of the waters, not, as now, fitful
and impetuous, but copious and constant. Then dam up the narrow opening
the river has cut through the coast line of hills, in its direct course
from the mountains to the sea, with a smaller and similar one cut by a
stream coming down from Theriso, and you have the whole water sheet of
the north side of the Aspravouna emptying into the bay of Suda. In this
supposed route of the Iardanos (now the Platanos), just where it
commences its cutting through the hills, is a large marsh, the remnant
of what was once a lake of a mile or more in width, when the Iardanos,
then a gentle, bounteous river, turned from its present course to run
eastward, and deposit its washings where they made the marshes of
Tuzla, and the shallows at the head of Suda Bay. Civilization,
ship-building, commerce, carried away the forests; and, thus changed[B]
into a furious mountain torrent,--three months a roaring flood which no
bridge can stride, and the rest of the year almost a dry pebbled
bed,--the Iardanos made a straight cut for the sea, drained its lake,
forgot its old courses, and changed, in time, its name; and _so_ it
happens that the Cydonians no longer dwell along the Iardanos.

While we are on our look-out, let us try to study out another puzzle,
which even Spratt left in doubt, i. e. the site of Pergamos. We know
that it was near both Cydonia and Achaia, and Spratt pretty conclusively
fixes the latter on the Dictynnian peninsula; so that it must have been
in our present field of view. Looking this over,