The mineral wealth of Armenia is very great; but like the other potential riches of the Turkish Empire, it profits nobody, not even the greedy despot whose word is death. Gold, silver, copper, iron, and minor metals, besides marble and other beautiful stones, are present in abundance. About three miles from Marsovan, where I preached, is a mountain called Tarshan Dagh (rabbit mountain), rich in gold; another called Goomish Dagh, about eight miles west, is laden with silver; and they are likely to remain so, for no one will rifle them of their treasures while Turkey endures. The Sultan, it is true, sends an officer from Constantinople under large salary, to take out the precious metals, but that person does very little work. He lives like a lord, lets things go as they will, bribes the palace officials, and all the gold and silver extracted does not pay his wages. The Sultan will not permit Christians to work mines, and if they did, he would rob them of the proceeds. Everywhere the condition is the same. Though Armenia is the oldest inhabited country, she is, in utilization, the newest; much newer than the United States, for indeed she does not exist yet. She is a virgin land, her mines not open, her soil not half tilled. The Turks and the Kurds are lazy and stagnant; they will do nothing, and they will not permit the industrious Armenian Christians to do anything of importance. The country has all the old fertility which made Asia Minor under the Byzantine Empire the garden of the world, till the Turks half turned it into a desert, as they do every spot accursed by their presence. The grain, the fruit, the vegetables are hardly, if at all, to be equaled. The watermelons raised on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris are the largest and sweetest of their kind; two melons are sometimes a camel's load. It is impossible for a family to use the whole of such a melon, which has to be cut up and sold in pieces. The grapes, either fresh or in the shape of wine or raisins, are of the first rank. Many varieties when cured and dried as raisins exceed in size the plumpest grapes of other lands. Nearly everything is raised or grows wild in Armenia which is to be had in the Northern or Southern States of America, though of course each country has some things peculiar to itself. The products of the North are paralleled by those of the rugged picturesque highlands of North Turkish and Russian Armenia, with their cold, snowy winters, short, hot summers, and mild intervening seasons; those of the South find their counterparts from the rich upland valleys, or the lowland plains needing irrigation, of Kurdistan and Persian Armenia (Azerbijan), with its semi-tropical climate, and alternations of wet and dry seasons. The grain crops are wheat, Indian corn, barley, and oats. Cotton is one of the main products; a great deal of tobacco and rice are raised; and sugar is made in the Persian part. In the fields and gardens you can find not