Water is the blood of the earth, and the purificator of the body in tropical regions and in creeds which, being regulated by latitudes, enforce frequent ablution; loud are the praises of Arab writers of wells and water-brooks, and great is their fountain and pool worship, the dipping in which, if their miraculous cases are to be credited, effects more and greater cures than those worked by hydropathists at Grafenberg; a Spaniard’s idea of a paradise on earth, of a “garden,” is a well-watered district; irrigation is fertility and wealth, and therefore, as in the East, wells, brooks, and water-courses have been a constant source of bickering; nay the very word _rivality_ has been derived from these quarrel and law-suit engendering rivers, as the name given to the well for which the men of Gerah and Isaac differed, was called _esek_ from the contention. [Sidenote: FOUNTAINS.] The flow of waters cannot be mistaken; the most dreary sterility edges the most luxuriant plenty, the most hopeless barrenness borders on the richest vegetation; the line of demarcation is perceived from afar, dividing the tawny desert from the verdurous garden. The Moors who came from the East were fully sensible of the value of this element; they collected the best springs with the greatest care, they dammed up narrow gorges into reservoirs, they constructed pools and underground cisterns, stemmed valleys with aqueducts that poured in rivers, and in a word exercised a magic influence over this element, which they guided and wielded at their will; their system of irrigation was far too perfect to be improved by Spaniard, or even destroyed. In those favoured districts where their artificial contrivances remain, Flora still smiles and Ceres rejoices with Pomona; wherever the ravages of war or the neglect of man have ruined them, the garden has relapsed into the desert, and plains once overflowing with corn, gladness, and population, have shrunk into sad and silent deserts. [Sidenote: THIRST.]