The lands belonging to the villages which they surround are reckoned by the Feddân, a very indefinite measure, being the amount which a yoke of oxen can plough (or rather two yoke used alternately) working with a single plough for twelve hours per diem during twenty-eight days in the summer and fourteen in the winter. In the hills the Feddân ranges from thirty-six to forty acres, and in the plains from twenty-eight to thirty-six, the soil being richer and heavier. The corn-seed per Feddân is from twenty-five to sixty kilos (Constantinople measure), and the yield per Feddân is about two hundred bushels of wheat, or fifty of barley. The village lands belong in reality to the Crown, and are held in fee-simple, paying tithes and also a fixed tax. They are equally inherited by the sons of a proprietor, but if uncultivated revert to the Crown. The limits of the lands are marked by valleys, ridges, or large stones, by which also the sub-divisions of the land among the villagers are shown. It is most interesting to note that the word Tahum, used in Hebrew to signify the “limits” of the Levitical cities (Numb, xxxv.), is still employed in the same sense by the peasantry, and in one case a great stone, marking the present boundary of the lands of Es Semû’a (Eshtemoa), which was a Levitical city, is just about the proper distance of 3000 cubits from the village, and is called Hajr et Takhâin, also probably a corruption of Tahum. The village land is annually divided among members of the community according to their power of cultivation. There is a custom regarding the land which seems of antiquity--namely, the Shkârah, or land which is cultivated by the villagers for any one of their number who is unable to till it himself; thus there is the Shkâret el Imâm, or “glebe of the religious minister,” and Shkâret en Nejjâr, or “carpenter’s portion,” which is cultivated for the village carpenter in return for his services. The possessions of a village vary from ten to a hundred Feddâns; thus at Abu Shûsheh, for instance, 5000 acres of arable land are held by a place containing some 400 inhabitants.