The plain, which skirts the Mediterranean from Jaffa to Cape Blanco, presents many interesting memorials of Hebrew antiquity and of European warfare. Every town along the coast has been the scene of contention between the armies of Christendom and those of Islamism; whence arises the motive which has determined us to incorporate the history of these cities with the narrative of the exploits whereon their fortunes have chiefly depended. Suffice it to mention as we go along, that the vicinity of Acre invites the attention of the naturalist, on account of certain facts recorded by Pliny, and repeated by subsequent historians. It is said by this writer, that it was at the mouth of the river Belus the art of making glass was first discovered. A party of sailors, who had occasion to visit the shore in that neighbourhood, propped up the kettle in which they were about to cook their provisions with sand and pieces of nitre; when to their surprise they found produced by the action of the fire on these ingredients, a new substance, which has added immensely to the comforts of life and to the progress of science. The sand of this remarkable stream confirmed for ages to supply, not only the manufactories of Sidon, but all other places, with materials for that beautiful production. Vessels from Italy were employed to remove it for the glass-houses of Venice and Genoa so late as the middle of the seventeenth century. There is another circumstance connected with the same river, which, in the mythological writings of antiquity, makes a still greater figure than the discovery just described. Lucian relates that the Belus, at certain seasons of the year, especially about the feast of Adonis, is of a bloody colour,--a fact which the heathens looked upon as proceeding from a kind of sympathy for the death of this favourite of Venus, who was killed by a wild boar in the mountains whence the stream takes its rise. "Something like this," says Maundrell, "we saw actually come to pass; for the water was stained to a surprising redness, and, as we had observed in travelling, had discoloured the sea a great way into a reddish hue, occasioned doubtless by a sort of minium, or red earth, washed into the river by the violence of the rain, and not by any stain from Adonis's blood."[163]