There were forests in the immediate vicinity, forests producing timbers of great length and thickness; for in the north and northeast practically all the buildings had wooden roofs, wooden intermediate floors, and other features of wood. Costly buildings, such as temples and churches, employed large wooden beams; but wood was used in much larger quantities in private dwellings, shops, stables, and barns. If wood had not been plentiful and cheap--which means grown near by--the builders would have adopted the building methods of their neighbors in the south, who used very little wood and developed the most perfect type of lithic architecture the world has ever seen. And here there exists a strange anomaly: Northern Syria, where so much wood was employed in antiquity, is absolutely treeless now; while in the mountains of southern Syria, where wood must have been scarce in antiquity to have forced upon the inhabitants an almost exclusive use of stone, there are still groves of scrub oak and pine, and travelers of half a century ago reported large forests of chestnut trees.[20] It is perfectly apparent that large parts of Syria once had soil and forests and springs and rivers, while it has none of these now, and that it had a much larger and better distributed rainfall in ancient times than it has now. Professor Butler's careful work is especially interesting because of its contrast to the loose statements of those who believe in climatic uniformity. So far as I am aware, no opponent of the hypothesis of climatic changes has ever even attempted to show by careful statistical analysis that the ancient water supply of such ruins was no greater than that of the present. The most that has been done is to suggest that there may have been sources of water which are now unknown. Of course, this might be true in a single instance, but it could scarcely be the case in many hundreds or thousands of ruins. Although the arguments in favor of a change of climate during the last two thousand years seem too strong to be ignored, their very strength seems to have been a source of error. A large number of people have jumped to the conclusion that the change which appears to have occurred in certain regions occurred everywhere, and that it consisted of a gradual desiccation.