and although these, too, are unhesitatingly named by modern travellers, yet all is arbitrary. All the Attic hills are at present barren; but in ancient times some were well wooded, as we may infer from the charcoal manufactures near Acharnae, mentioned by Aristophanes; but the greater part of them were not, like our hills, clad with heather, but with thyme, marjoram, and other aromatic herbs. The fact that Hymettus, even in antiquity, had no trees, may be inferred from the circumstance, that it was the habitation of bees, and the place in which their breeding was attended to. Attica was well known to the ancients themselves as a country that was not fertile, and where the rocky ground was covered only with a very thin crust of soil (λεπτόγεων in Thucydides); it had two plains of a very different character, the one that of Eleusis and Thria (τὸ Θριάσιον πεδίον), which was fertile, whence Eleusis was justly the seat of the worship of Demeter; the other was the plain of Marathon, which was not fertile, and is at present deserted; it was covered only with wild fennel and such like herbs, nor was it as flat as the Thriasian plain. Attica has little water, and is poor in rivers and springs; Athens itself had only one good spring. The rivers are so insignificant that in any other country they would not be mentioned at all; but in Attica everything has a general interest and cannot be forgotten, so that the Cephisus and Ilisus, though only small rivulets, are better known than the Oxus and Jaxartes. The Cephisus does not even reach the sea; it flows in a western and the Ilisus in an eastern direction. I spell both names with a single _s_, which is the ancient Greek orthography found in the good MSS. of Aristophanes and Plato, and in inscriptions. The spelling Κηφισσός and Ἰλισσός, however, likewise became common in antiquity, and was that generally received by the Romans; and when a Roman uses a single _s_, it must be regarded as his special choice.