=Effects of this Variety.= The different zones touch each other closely, and yet their wide differences in physical contour, climate, flora and fauna constitute invisible but insuperable barriers and produce fundamentally diverse types of life and civilization. To-day, as in the past, inhabitants of cities, tent dwellers, merchants, and peasants live in this narrow land within a few miles, yet separated from each other by the widest possible difference in culture and manner of life. The character of the land made impossible a closely knit civilization. It could never become the centre of a great world-power. It was rather destined to be the abode of many small tribes or nations, with widely differing institutions and degrees of culture. The great variety of scenery, climate, and life, however, made Palestine an epitome of all the world. It was pre-eminently fitted to be the home of a people called to speak a vital message in universal terms to all the races of the earth. Its striking contrasts and its marvellous beauty and picturesqueness also arrested the attention of primitive men and explain the prominence of nature worship among the early inhabitants of Palestine and the large place that its rocks, brooks, hills and meadows occupy in Israel's literature. =Openness to the Arabian Desert.= The second marked peculiarity of Palestine is its openness to the desert. As Principal Smith has aptly said, Palestine "lay, so to speak, broadside on to the desert." With its comparatively fertile fields, it has proved a loadstone that for thousands of years has attracted the wandering Arabian tribes. These came in, however, not as a rule in great waves, but as families, or small tribes. Up through the South Country they penetrated the hills of Judah. There in time they learned to cultivate the vine, although they still retained their flocks. East of Moab and Gilead the arable land merges gradually into the rocky desert and the Arabs to-day, as in the past, claim as their own all the land to the Jordan and Dead Sea valley, except where the settled population successfully contests their claim by arms. Palestine, therefore, has always been powerfully influenced by the peculiar life and centralized government and fierce rivalry between tribes and petty peoples--these are but a few of the characteristics of Palestine's history that are primarily due to its openness to Arabia.