With respect to the difficulties of the exit of this large body of persons from Egypt in the sudden way which the narrative in Exodus seems to describe, they depend (I think) mainly on the broad and general manner of description habitual to Oriental writers, who do not trouble themselves with details, or with exceptions, but describe _in the mass_, stating that to be done by all which was done by most, or by those of most account; regarding a nation as concentrated in its heads; and directing attention to the main events, to the neglect of the various details into which they were broken up. A candid reader, making fair allowance for these characteristics of Oriental style, and for the brevity of the sacred narrative, will scarcely be much troubled by the difficulties of the start and the march, as they have been urged by some critics. It is certain migrations of tribes, quite as large as that of Israel is said to have been, have from time to time taken place in the east, and indeed in the west also. Such migrations have frequently been sudden--the emigrants have started off with their women, children, and all their possessions on a certain day[79]--they have traversed enormous distances, much greater ones than the Israelites traversed, and have finally settled themselves in new abodes. That the Israelites made such a migration there cannot be a doubt. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, all accepted the fact as certain. Cavils as to their exact numbers, or as to the particular expressions used in Exodus, do not touch the main fact, but show (if they show anything) either that our ancient manuscripts are here and there defective, or that an early Oriental historian does not write in the exact and accurate style of a nineteenth-century occidental critic. The difficulty which attaches to the subsistence of the Israelites for forty years in the wilderness of Tih, concerns almost wholly the sustenance of their flocks and herds, which are said to have been numerous, and have been calculated at two million head of cattle. The answer to this difficulty may be very brief. In the first place, we are not told that the cattle did not very rapidly decrease; for no mention is made of the people possessing any considerable number in the later portion of the sojourn, until an enormous booty is captured from the Midianites;[80] and in the second place, there is ample reason to believe that the wilderness was anciently very much more fertile than it is at present, and quite capable of furnishing pasturage to flocks and herds of a large size. The recent explorations of Mr. Tristram and Mr. Holland have placed this fact beyond a doubt, and have shown that the Sinaitic peninsula, at any rate, was a "desert" merely in comparison with the richly agricultural countries of Egypt and Palestine.