But we are not left to inference in the matter, however good that inference may be. A little to the south of the Painted Desert, in the midst of the barren plateau of northern Arizona, of which the former makes a part, stand the remains of a petrified forest. Huge chalcedony trunks of trees, so savingly transmuted into stone that their genus is still decipherable, lie scattered here over the barren ground in waste profusion, one of them still spanning a cañon just as it fell in that, to it, destructive day of a far prehistoric past. The rock stratum on which their remains lie is of Triassic and Cretaceous times and the petrifications show that in the Cretaceous a stately forest overspread the land. In those days at least the spot was fertile where now sparse sagebrush and cacti find a living hard. Not here alone where the blocks are so conspicuous as to invite their carrying away is a former flourishing growth of vegetation attested, but over large adjoining areas of desert search has brought the like past tenancy to light. Fragments of what once were trees have been picked up in the Little Colorado basin and in the neighborhood of Ash Fork, on both sides, that is, of the present forest crown that covers the higher part of the plateau from which rise the San Francisco Peaks. In the blue distance the mountains look down verdure-clad upon a now encircling waste, but one which in earlier eras was as pine-bearing as they. Their lofty oasis is all that is now left of a once fertile country; the retreat of the trees up the slopes in consequence of a diminishing rainfall, until a rise of two thousand feet from what once was timber-land is necessary to reach the tree-line of today, being typical of desert lands, and testifying to greater aqueous affluence in the past. In the same manner streams descend from the cedar-clad range of the Lebanon to lose themselves in the Arabian desert just without the doors of Damascus; and Palestine has desiccated within history times. Palestine, a land once flowing with milk and honey, can hardly flow poor water now, and furnishes another straw to mark the ebbing of the water supply.