I protest against the immorality of corrupting the native traditions, by relating to the peasantry the theories of modern writers as authentic facts, for it destroys the last undoubted source of information as to ancient topography. The confusion caused by Crusading and early Christian traditions which have been engrafted in a precisely similar manner, forms already a most serious difficulty; and if in addition we are to have modern foreign theories disseminated among the peasantry, identification will be impossible. Throughout the course of the Survey, we never allowed the peasantry to suppose that we attached more value to one name which they gave, than to another, and we never asked leading questions or gave them any information as to ancient sites. Our next camp was at the village of Mejdel, near the shore, just north of Ascalon, separated from Beit Jibrîn by nineteen miles of corn-land and sandy downs. The plain was dotted with brown mud villages, and was coloured with patches of purple lupines. We passed on our march through Keratîya, in which we probably recognise the name of the Philistine Cherethites, and where is a Crusading tower now known as Kŭl’at el Fenish, “Castle of the Philistines,” thence crossing over the sand-ridge we looked down on green hedgeless fields, brown ploughland, and beautiful olive-groves, and on the village of Mejdel, with its conspicuous minaret and tall palm-grove. This place is the principal town between Gaza and Jaffa: it boasts of a bazaar and has a weekly market. The inhabitants are rich and well-disposed. There are sandy lanes, hedged with the prickly pear, round the town, and on the west a large cemetery near the sand-dunes. To the north, under a row of aged olive trees, we found a most pleasant camping ground. From this camp we made the large-scale survey of Ascalon, and cleared up the curious question as to the two Episcopal towns of that name which existed in the fifth century, the one being apparently Ascalon by the sea, the second a ruined site called ’Askelôn in the hills near Beit Jibrîn. Ascalon, “the bride of Syria,” is now entirely ruinous, and only the fragments of its great walls, built by the English, under Richard Lion-Heart, in 1191 A.D., remain half buried by the great dunes of rolling sand, which are ever being blown up by the sea breeze from the south-west. The whole interior of the site is covered with rich soil, to a depth of about ten feet, and the natives find fragments of fine masonry, shafts, capitals, and other remains of the old city, by digging in this.