autonomy, keeping up a perpetual frontier
war for the sake of becoming possessed of or of retaining a glorious
sovereignty over a few acres of corn in the plains, or some wooded
ravines in the mountains. Year after year there will be scenes of bloody
conflict, in which petty armies will fight petty battles on behalf of
petty interests, but so fiercely, and with such furious animosity, that
the country will suffer from the strife as much as, or even more than,
from an invasion. There will be no truce to their struggles until they
all fall under the sway of a foreign master, and, except in the interval
between two conquests, they will have no national existence, their
history being almost entirely merged in that of other nations.

From remote antiquity Syria was in the condition just described,
and thus destined to become subject to foreign rule. Chaldaea, Egypt,
Assyria, and Persia presided in turn over its destinies, while Macedonia
and the empires of the West were only waiting their opportunity to lay
hold of it. By its position it formed a kind of meeting-place where most
of the military nations of the ancient world were bound sooner or later
to come violently into collision. Confined between the sea and the
desert, Syria offers the only route of easy access to an army marching
northwards from Africa into Asia, and all conquerors, whether attracted
to Mesopotamia or to Egypt by the accumulated riches on the banks of the
Euphrates or the Nile, were obliged to pass through it in order to reach
the object of their cupidity. It might, perhaps, have escaped this fatal
consequence of its position, had the formation of the country permitted
its tribes to mass themselves together, and oppose a compact body to
the invading hosts; but the range of mountains which forms its backbone
subdivides it into isolated districts, and by thus restricting each
tribe to a narrow existence maintained among them a mutual antagonism.
The twin chains, the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, which divide the
country down the centre, are composed of the same kind of calcareous
rocks and sandstone, while the same sort of reddish clay has been
deposited on their slopes by the glaciers of the same geological
period.*

* Drake remarked in the Lebanon several varieties of
limestone, which have been carefully catalogued by Blanche
and Lartet. Above these strata, which belong to the Jurassic
formation, come reddish sandstone, then beds of