This depression must have taken place at a comparatively late geological period; all the cretaceous rocks had been deposited before it occurred, for their strata all dip down east, on the west side of the valley. There are even the means of fixing the period pretty exactly, for there are marine formations deposited on the cretaceous rocks which seem to have no dip, namely, the coloured marls and bituminous limestones which occur at Neby Musa, and again at the edge of the plain of Beisân, in the first case 200 feet higher than the Mediterranean, in the latter, 200 feet below that level; these strata are, I believe, attributed to the Eocene period. It appears that even at an earlier epoch the region was bituminous: the latest of the cretaceous formations disturbed by the depression contain bitumen which seems to have been once liquid, and, near Masada, there are even black bituminous stalactites on the rock. The Eocene coloured marls contain innumerable fossils, and the formation appears to have been deposited under water. It is probable that in Eocene times the Dead Sea reached up nearly to Hermon, and to the Red Sea, with which the Mediterranean must have been then in full connection, as the Isthmus of Suez had not then been formed. A further change was wrought still later, for the convulsions which were accompanied by the great outflow of lava which has covered so large a district west and north of the Sea of Galilee, and in the Lejja country, are, I believe, dated by geologists as of the Tertiary period, and in one place the lava appeared to me to overlie the coloured marls. The chain of Gilboa, Little Hermon, and Tabor, with the Galilean hills, have all been more or less affected by this volcanic disturbance, and perhaps the depression of the valley may then have increased still more. The valley having sunk to its present depression, the melting snows of Hermon probably began to pour into it, and as the chasm had now no outlet (the watershed of the ’Arabah on the south having been raised about 800 feet above sea-level), a large salt lake must have formed at its southern end; the history of the sheets of water then occupying the distance of 150 miles, appears to be recorded in the formations now found in the valley.