During the past few decades a great change has been made for the better, as is attested by the large number of American agricultural implements which are now found throughout the plain and the hundreds of ginning machines, looms, and thousands of spindles--mostly from England--which are seen in the cotton factories of Tarsus and Adana. But, although a great advance has been made over the condition which obtained a third of a century ago, there is yet vast room for improvement. When the Ottoman Government shall awaken to the necessity of conserving its natural resources, when it shall systematically reforest the territory whose once precious woodlands have been so sadly despoiled, and shall duly drain the vast swamps which have been formed by the neglect of its treasure-giving rivers, _Cilicia Campestris_ will again be worthy of the name which legend tells us it once bore--Garden of Eden. As it is now, the whole extent of Cilicia from the Taurus to the Amanus and from the mouth of the Cydnus to the headwaters of the Pyramus is chiefly remarkable for ruins of cities and the sites of towns whose very names are forgotten. Everywhere on the plain and on the girdling foothills, one will see crumbling fortresses built by Genoese and Venetians; moss-covered strongholds of Saracens and Crusaders; Corinthian columns and marble colonnades, arches, and vaulted roofs of Christian churches; reminders of mediæval warfare and of days when this historic land was swept by inundations of barbarian hordes, who destroyed by fire and sword the arts and labors which were once the pride of western Asia. Everywhere one observes fragmentary remains of Roman bridges and arches, of aqueducts and causeways, of Greek altars attributed to Alexander to commemorate his victory over the Persians; dilapidated walls and towers and sepulchral grottoes with an occasional Greek or Arabic inscription to mark the sites of Corycus, Pompeiopolis, and Anazarba--those cities of renown, where their inhabitants could quietly rest under their vines and fig trees free from the incursions of predatory Cliteans and Tibareni and barbarians of Hun and Scithian savagery, who spread terror and devastation wherever they could gratify their lust of cruelty or plunder. It was the boast of the Mongols that so complete was their work of “extirpation and erasure” of certain cities, where they had wreaked their full fury of rapine and murder, “that horses might run without stumbling over the ground where they had once stood.”[223] Judging by the calamities that have been inflicted on the once populous cities of Cilicia one would say that they were, in the expressive words of St. Prosper of Aquitaine, _depredatione vastatœ_--ravaged by depredations as ruthless as those that ever characterized the frightful irruptions of Timur or Jenghiz Khan.