Josephus, after describing in glowing language the beauty and fruitfulness of the country of Gennesaret, says, “For besides the good temperature of the air, it is also watered from a most fertile fountain. The people of the country call it Capharnaum. Some have thought it to be a vein of the Nile, because it produces the Coracin fish as well as that lake does which is near to Alexandria.”[15] The truth turns out to be much stranger than Josephus imagined, for the Sea of Galilee can claim affinity by its fishes with the Victoria Nyanza. Rev. Canon Tristram, who more than any other traveller has studied the natural history of the Holy Land, has made the comparison in some detail, and made out the relationship of the fishes beyond doubt. He declares that of all the forms of life in Palestine the fishes are the most interesting. There are no fishes in the Dead Sea; but there are fishes, chiefly Cyprinidæ, or of the perch tribe, in the little streams and rivers close to the Dead Sea. “I have seen the date palm absolutely dipping its fronds into the Dead Sea as it hung over--for on the east side the date palm is very luxuriant. On the eastern shores there is as wonderful an exuberance of vegetable life as will be found anywhere on the face of the earth. The plants are like hot-house plants growing wild. In the warm waters entering to the sea there are small fishes of various species. We found thirteen new kinds of fishes in the Jordan and its affluents. Dr Günther of the British Museum kindly described them in a paper in the ‘Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London,’ and certainly such a discovery amply repaid our search. “I wish now to point out the conclusions come to from these fishes, for they are really the climax of the physical geography of the Jordan Valley. The fishes found in the Sea of Galilee not only belong for the most part to species different from those found in any stream flowing into the Mediterranean, but they belong frequently to different genera. Some years before, I brought home the type specimen of a fish, the only species I could find in some salt lakes of the Sahara, and Dr Günther declared it to be not only a new species but a new genus. I remember Sir Charles Lyell observing, ‘You have got there the last living representative of the Saharan ocean.’ We found in the Sea of Galilee three more species of the same genus, but each distinct. Speke brought back two species of the same family from the Nyanza, and Dr Kirk has described several from the Zambezi and the neighbouring region.