As to the advance of agriculture we have no witnesses to speak; but if, on the whole eastern and southern slope of the Haurân, from the summits of the mountains down to the desert, the stones, with which this volcanic plain was once strewed, are thrown into heaps or arranged in long rows, and thus the most glorious fields are obtained, we may recognise therein the hand of the only government which has governed this land as it might and should be governed. In the Ledjâ, a lava-plateau thirteen leagues long and eight to nine broad, which is now almost uninhabited, there grew once vines and figs between the streams of lava; the Roman road connecting Bostra with Damascus ran across it; in the Ledjâ and around it are counted the ruins of twelve larger and thirty-nine smaller townships. It can be shown that, at the bidding of the same governor who erected the province of Arabia, the mighty aqueduct was constructed which led the water from the mountains of the Haurân to Canatha (Kerak) in the plain, and not far from it a similar one in Arrha (Rahâ)--buildings of Trajan, which may be named by the side of the port of Ostia and the Forum of Rome. The flourishing of commercial intercourse is attested by the very choice of the capital of the new province. Bostra existed under the Nabataean government, and an inscription of king Malichu has been found there; but its military and commercial importance begins with the introduction of direct Roman government. “Bostra,” says Wetzstein, “has the most favourable situation of all the towns in eastern Syria; even Damascus, which owes its size to the abundance of its water and to its situation protected by the eastern Trachon, will excel Bostra only under a weak government, while the latter under a strong and wise government must elevate itself in a few decades to a fabulous prosperity. It is the great market for the Syrian desert: the high mountains of Arabia and Peraea, and its long rows of booths of stone still in their desolation, furnish evidence of the reality of an earlier, and the possibility of a future, greatness.” The remains of the Roman road, leading thence by way of Salchat and Ezrak to the Persian Gulf, show that Bostra was, along with Petra and Palmyra, a medium of traffic from the East to the Mediterranean. This town was probably constituted on a Hellenic basis already by Trajan; at least it is called thenceforth the “new Trajanic Bostra,” and the Greek coins begin with Pius, while later the legend becomes Latin in consequence of the bestowal of colonial rights by Alexander. Petra too had a Greek municipal constitution already under Hadrian, and several other places subsequently received municipal rights; but in this territory of the Arabians down to the latest period the tribe and the tribal village preponderated. [Sidenote: Stone buildings of eastern Syria.]