any considerable numbers.  It grows singly, or in groups of two or three, at various points of the coast from Tripolis to Acre, but is only abundant in a few spots more towards the south, as at Haifa, under Carmel, where “fine date-palms” are numerous in the gardens,[29] and at Jaffa, where travellers remark “a broad belt of two or three miles of date-palms and orange-groves laden with fruit."[210] The wood was probably not much used as timber except in the earliest times, since Lebanon afforded so many kinds of trees much superior for building purposes.  The date-palm was also valued for its fruit, though the produce of the Phoenician groves can never have been of a high quality.

The sycamore, or sycamine-fig, is a dark-foliaged tree, with a gnarled stem when it is old;[211] it grows either singly or in clumps, and much more resembles in appearance the English oak than the terebinth does, which has been so often compared to it.  The stem is short, and sends forth wide lateral branches forking out in all directions, which renders the tree very easy to climb.  It bears a small fig in great abundance, and probably at all seasons, which, however, is “tasteless and woody,"[212] though eaten by the inhabitants.  The sycamore is common along the Phoenician lowland, but is a very tender tree and will not grow in the mountains.

The plane-tree, common in Asia Minor, is not very frequent either in Phoenicia or Palestine.  It occurs, however, on the middle course of the Litany, where it breaks through the roots of Lebanon,[213] and also in many of the valleys[214] on the western flank of the mountain.  The maritime pine (Pinus maritama) extends in forests here and there along the shore,[215] and is found of service in checking the advance of the sand dunes, which have a tendency to encroach seriously on the cultivable soil.

Of the upland trees the most common is the oak.  There are three species of oak in the country.  The most prevalent is an evergreen oak (Quercus pseudococcifera), sometimes mistaken by travellers for a holly, sometimes for an ibex, which covers in a low dense bush many miles of the hilly country everywhere, and occasionally becomes a large tree in the Lebanon valleys,[216] and on the flanks of Casius and Bargylus.  Another common oak is Quercus AEgilops, a much smaller and deciduous tree, very stout-trunked, which grows in scattered groups on Carmel and elsewhere, “giving a park-like appearance to the landscape."[217] The third kind is Quercus infectoria, a gall-oak, also deciduous, and very conspicuous from the large number of bright, chestnut-coloured, viscid galls which it bears, and which are now sometimes gathered for exportation.[218]