the number of square yards. Moreover, it seems to assume the besieged to have been all comfortably lodged; it ignores altogether the estimate taken by Cestius; while, if the numbers adopted by Mr. Fergusson be correct, the horrors of the siege must have been grossly exaggerated, and the stories told by Josephus cannot be accepted; and, for a last objection, it appears to be assumed, what is manifestly incorrect, that every able-bodied man fought. For this vast mass of poor helpless people were like a _brutum pecus_; they took no part whatever in the fighting. Nothing is clearer than the statement made by Josephus of the fighting men. They were twenty-three thousand in all at the beginning: they did not invite help, and probably would not allow it, from the population within the walls. These, who very speedily found relief, in the thinning of death, for their first lack of accommodation, sat crouching and cowering in the houses, desperately hoping against hope, starving from the very commencement, beginning to die in heaps almost before the camp of the 10th Legion was pitched upon the Mount of Olives. The numbers given by Josephus may not be correct within a great many thousands; there is reason enough, however, to believe that, within limits very much narrower than some of his readers are disposed to believe, his numbers may be fairly depended on. After all, it matters little enough what the numbers really were; and even if we let them be what any one chooses to call them, there yet remains no doubt that the sufferings of the people were very cruel, and that, of all wretched and bloody sieges in the world’s history, few, if any, have been more wretched or more bloody than the siege of Jerusalem by Titus. Footnote 9: Fergusson’s Art. ‘Jerusalem,’ Biblical Dictionary. Footnote 10: Taking the shape of the city to be circular and 33 stadia in circumference (it was more nearly circular than square), we find its area to have been rather more than 3,500,000 square yards. This, at 30 square yards to one person, gives about 120,000 for the ordinary population. And there were extensive gardens and numerous villas to the north and east which contained another population altogether quite impossible to estimate. And it must not be forgotten that Cestius (Joseph. ‘Bell. Jud.’ vi. ix. 3) caused an estimate to be made, a very few years before the siege, of the numbers actually present at the Passover, and that the _official_ return was 2,560,500 persons. The whole question is clearly stated by Mr. Williams (‘Holy City,’ vol. i. p. 481). And, as he points out very justly, it is not a question how many would be comfortably accommodated in Jerusalem, but how many were actually _crammed_ into it.