The Jordan Valley is the lowest portion of the earth's surface. No other depressions are more than three hundred feet below sea level, but the Jordan is six hundred and eighty-two feet lower than the ocean at the Sea of Galilee, and nearly thirteen hundred feet lower where it enters the Dead Sea. This wonderful depression, which includes the Dead Sea, forty-five miles long, and the valley south of it, one hundred miles in length, is two hundred and fifty miles long and from four to fourteen miles in width, and is called the Arabah. The sources of the Jordan are one hundred and thirty-four miles from the mouth, but the numerous windings of the stream make it two hundred miles long. The Jordan is formed by the union of three streams issuing from springs at an elevation of seventeen hundred feet above the sea. The principal source is the spring at Dan, one of the largest in the world, as it sends forth a stream twenty feet wide and from twenty to thirty inches deep. The spring at Banias, the Caesarea Philippi of the Scriptures, is the eastern source. The Hashbany flows from a spring forming the western source. A few miles south of the union of the streams above mentioned the river widens into the waters of Merom, a small lake nearly on a level with the Mediterranean. In the next few miles it descends rapidly, and empties into the Sea of Galilee, called also the Sea of Chinnereth, Sea of Tiberias, and Lake of Gennesaret. In the sixty-five miles from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea the fall is about six hundred feet. The rate of descent is not uniform throughout the whole course of the river. In one section it drops sixty feet to the mile, while there is one stretch of thirteen miles with a descent of only four and a half feet to the mile. The average is twenty-two feet to the mile. The width varies from eighty to one hundred and eighty feet, and the depth from five to twelve feet. Caesarea Philippi, at the head of the valley, Capernaum, Magdala, Tiberias, and Tarrichaea were cities on the Sea of Galilee. Jericho and Gilgal were in the plain at the southern extremity, and Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, upon which the wrath of God was poured, were somewhere in the region of the Dead Sea.