How striking is this passage from Dr. Geikie’s “Holy Land and the Bible.” He says, “In the Wilderness of Beersheba are bee-hive huts of stone, conjectured to be ancient native houses of the Amalekites. They are from seven to eight ft. in diameter, with a small door of two uprights and a lintel, about two ft. square. In one dwelling a flint arrowhead and some shells were found. _Close by are some circles of upright stones._ The whole country was at one time inhabited. Nearly every hill has ancient dwellings on the top and stone circles, also great cairns. The extraordinary resemblance, the identity in every point so struck Professor Palmer, who discovered this settlement, that in his ‘Desert of Exodus’ he engraved a Cornish bee-hive hut to show how it was a counterpart to the huts of Beersheba.” [Illustration: _Fig. 19._--OVEN AT NOUGARET, DEP. OF LOT. (_Dog Kennel under Shelf._)] But these bee-hive huts are themselves a reproduction in stone of the tents with which the primeval race wandered on the steppes of the Altai before ever they reached Palestine on the one hand and Europe on the other. The Nomad made his tent of skins stretched on poles. It was circular, and the smoke escaped through a hole in the top. When he ceased to ramble, he constructed his habitation on the same principle exactly as his tent, circular and domed. On the Siberian tundras and in Lapland there are still in use two sorts of huts; one, the smoke-hut, is precisely like a bee-hive habitation. It is, however, too small to allow of a fire being kept burning in the centre, and it is heated in this way--a fire is kindled and then allowed to go out. When extinct, the chimney hole at the top is closed, and the owner retires into his hut, which retains the heat for a great many hours. Sometimes, however, like the _bo’h_ in the Hebrides, the fire is at the side, but owing to the smallness of the hovel, must be kept low. Castrén, in his travels among the Samojeds and Ostjaks, was sometimes obliged to spend months in one of these huts. At first he was obliged to go outside in all weathers, climb up the side of the hut and plug his chimney to keep in the warmth; but after a while he rigged up a bundle of old cloth attached to a pulley, and he was able by this means to block the opening from within, by pulling a string. [Illustration: _Fig. 20._--PLAN OF OVEN AT NOUGARET.]