to that carried between the junction with the Khabour and Hit.  More recently, the decline of the stream in its latter course has been found to be even greater.  Neglect of the banks has allowed the river to spread itself more and more widely over the land:  and it is said that, except in the flood time, very little of the Euphrates water reaches the sea.  Nor is this an unprecedented or very unusual state of things.  From the circumstance (probably) that it has been formed by the deposits of streams flowing from the east as well as from the north, the lower Mesopotamian plain slopes not only to the south, but to the west.  The Euphrates, which has low banks, is hence at all times inclined to leave its bed, and to flow off to the right, where large tracts are below its ordinary level.  Over these it spreads itself, forming the well-known “Chaldaean marshes,” which absorb the chief proportion of the water that flows into them, and in which the “great river” seems at various times to have wholly, or almost wholly, lost itself.  No such misfortune can befall the Tigris, which runs in a deep bed, and seldom varies its channel, offering a strong contrast to the sister stream.

Frequent allusion has been made, in the course of this description of the Tigris and Euphrates, to the fact of their having each a flood season.  Herodotus is scarcely correct when he says that in Babylonia “the river does not, as in Egypt, overflow the corn-lands of its own accord, but is spread over them by the help of engines.”  Both the Tigris and Euphrates rise many feet each spring, and overflow their banks in various places.  The rise is caused by the melting of the snows in the mountain regions from which the two rivers and their affluents spring.  As the Tigris drains the southern, and the Euphrates the northern side of the same mountain range, the flood of the former stream is earlier and briefer than that of the latter.  The Tigris commonly begins to rise early in March, and reaches its greatest height in the first or second week of May, after which it rapidly declines, and returns to its natural level by the middle of June.  The Euphrates first swells about the middle of March, and is not in full flood till quite the end of May or the beginning of June; it then continues high for above a month, and does not sink much till the middle of July, after which it gradually falls till September.  The country inundated by the Tigris is chiefly that on its lower course, between the 32d and 31st parallels, the territory of the Beni Lam Arabs.  The territory which the Euphrates floods is far more extensive.  As high up as its junction with the Khabour, that stream is described as, in the month of April, “spreading over the surrounding country like a sea.”  From Hit downwards, it inundates both its banks, more especially the country above Baghdad (to which it is carried by the Saklawiyeh canal), the tract west of the Birs Nimrud and extending thence by way