As a contrast to this rough and ragged region, there lie close at hand large fertile plains, affording pasturage for unnumbered cattle, and of a tolerably equable temperature, so that the animals which are pastured in it can find food throughout the year. Through the centre of Palestine runs the Jordan, fertilizing its banks with perpetual verdure, and ending its course in the sulphurous and bituminous waters of the Dead Sea, under whose waves the ruins of the wicked cities are supposed to lie. Westward we have the shore of the Mediterranean with its tideless waves of the salt sea, and on the eastward of the mountain range that runs nearly parallel to the sea is the great Lake of Tiberias, so large as to have earned the name of the Sea of Galilee. [Illustration: THE SWALLOW AND SWIFT.] Under these favourable conditions, therefore, the number of species which are found in Palestine is perhaps greater than can be seen in any other part of the earth of the same dimensions, and it seems probable that for this reason, among many others, Palestine was selected to be the Holy Land. If, for example, the Christian Church had been originated under the tropics, those who lived in a cold climate could scarcely have understood the language in which the Scriptures must necessarily have been couched. Had it, on the contrary, taken its rise in the Arctic regions, the inhabitants of the tropics and temperate regions could not have comprehended the imagery in which the teachings of Scripture must have been conveyed. But the small and geographically insignificant Land of Palestine combines in itself many of the characteristics which belong respectively to the cold, the temperate, and the hot regions of the world, so that the terms in which the sacred writings are couched are intelligible to a very great proportion of the world's inhabitants. [Illustration: VIEW OF THE SEA OF GALILEE.] This being the case, we naturally expect to find that several species of the Swallow are inhabitants of Palestine, if so migratory a bird can be said to be an inhabitant of any one country. [Illustration: THE SWALLOW'S FAVOURITE HAUNT.]