Haggai ii. 17.-"I SMOTE YOU WITH BLASTING AND WITH MILDEW AND WITH HAIL IN ALL THE LABOURS OF YOUR HANDS; YET YE TURNED NOT TO ME, SAITH THE LORD."

1649. Blasting and Mildew.-Blasting and mildew were very frequent in Bible lands and times. Along with war and pestilence, they were the most common judgments inflicted by God upon His ungrateful and rebellious people, and were universally regarded, not merely as a visitation of God, but as a special product of God's creative power. The cause and the effect were confounded. Since that time, men have tried to find out, in secondary causes, the rationale of the pestilence that so long walked in darkness. It was natural to seek in occult regions for the explanation of an occult mystery; and therefore it was attributed to meteoric influences, to lunar eclipses, to certain combinations of the planets. Modern science has given the true interpretation of the riddle. Blasting and mildew are now conclusively ascertained to be produced by plants; to be the diseases occasioned by the growth of minute fungi. Ever since plants have existed, these vegetable parasites have preyed upon them. They appear in greater or less abundance every year, are fostered into excessive growth by certain favourable conditions of soil and climate, and checked in their development by certain unfavourable conditions.

There are four diseases in corn produced by fungi-smut, bunt, rust, and mildew. The last term is very vague and unsatisfactory. In modern times, as indeed by the Hebrews, it represents no definite idea, or a very different idea to different individuals. The farmer, the vine grower, the hop cultivator, the gardener, the housewife, apply it indiscriminately to the effect produced by different species, and even genera of fungi upon the objects of their care. Speaking with scientific accuracy, the term mildew should be restricted to that disease of corn which is caused by the fungus known to botanists as the Puccinia graminia. It is derived from the Saxon words mehl-thau, meaning meal dew, and makes its appearance in the corn-fields in May or June, and first takes possession of the lower green leaves, which become sickly, and break out through the skin which rises round them in blisters into rusty patches, as though the corn-stalk had been powdered with red ochre. Examined under the microscope, these red

patches resolve themselves into dense masses of round one-celled spores, rising from the midst of delicate branched threads, which insinuate themselves in a complete network amongst the cells of the diseased leaf. A month or two later it changes its colour gradually from a rusty red to a deep brown tint; and under the microscope its spores become pear-shaped, each tapering gradually into a stalk, and also two-celled-each cell filled with granular contents. Finally, when the corn is nearly or fully ripe, the straw and the culm are profusely streaked with blackest spots, ranging in length from a minute dot to an inch. This is the fully developed mildew, and once seen, is not likely to be mistaken for anything else. When the fungus is abundant, a field which promised well in the blossoming time, grievously disappoints the farmer in the harvest and the threshing season, the reason of the deficit being often wrapped up in mystery to him.

The cereals are not the only food plants exposed to the attacks of blasting and mildew. Onions, cabbages, turnips, beetroot, peas, spinach, gourds,-in short, all the green crops we raise often suffer severely from this scourge. Leprous mildews of different species are now and then fearfully fatal to the coffee plantations of Ceylon, the orange groves of St. Michael, the olive woods in the south of Europe, the mulberry tree of Syria and China, and the cottonfields of India. All of these blights and mildews on the corn crops and green crops may well be called by God, My great army." Individually minute and insignificant, by the sheer force of untold numbers, they are mightier for harm than storms and earthquakes. -REV. HUGH MACMILLAN (condensed from Family Treasury).

66

Matthew vii. 23.-" AND THEN WILL I PROFESS UNTO THEM, I NEVER KNEW YOU DEPART FROM ME, YE THAT WORK INIQUITY." 1650. Mere Profession Valueless.-The verb to know is frequently used in Scripture in the sense to appropriate,-as Ezek. xix. 7; Psa. i. 6; Amos iii. 12; Rom. vii. 15; Rev. ii. 17; and so in the text: "I never knew "—that is, appropriated-"you as My disciples;"-preachers and workers of miracles, real or pretended, under Christ, yet disapproved! "Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them" (Jer. vi. 30).-Car

PENTER.

Genesis xi. 31.-"AND THEY WENT FORTH WITH THEM FROM UR OF THE CHALDEES, TO GO INTO THE LAND OF CANAAN."

66

1651. Ur of the Chaldees.-This place in the East has long been identified with Urfah, in Mesopotamia, two days' journey from Nisbis, in the way to the river Tigris. This Urfah," says a writer in the "Scripture Topography" of the Christian Knowledge Society, "is also held to be the site of the ancient Christian city, Edessa; and Edessa by old writers was identified with Erech, one of the cities founded by Nimrod (Gen. x. 10). Taking these facts together, it is somewhat remarkable that one of the results of the excavations and researches of the last few years is, that Erech and Ur are now supposed to have been situated near one another in Southern Babylonia.

"Orchoe, a city of Southern Babylonia, placed by Ptolemy among the marshes in the direction of Arabia Deserta (vi., 20, § 7). There can be little doubt that it is to be identified with one of the great mounds lately excavated in those parts, and that the one now called Warka represents its position. It was supposed that another mound in the immediate neighbourhood, Mugeyer, was the same as the Ur of the Chaldees;' and there is now good reason for identifying it as the site of that celebrated place. The name of Warka reads, on inscriptions lately discovered by Mr. Taylor, Hur or Hurik, which is nearly the same with the Orech of the LXX. (the Erech of our version) and the Orchoe of Ptolemy (l. c.). Moreover, Hur and Warka are constantly connected in inscriptions, just as Erech and Accad are in the Bible. It is most probable that the Orcheni ('Opxnvoí), described in Strabo as an astronomical sect of Chaldæans, dwelling near Babylon (xxi., p. 739); in Ptolemy, as a people in Arabia, living near the Persian Gulf (v., 19, § 2); and in Pliny, as an agricultural population, who banked the waters of the Euphrates, and compelled them to flow into the Tigris (vi., 27, §31), were really the inhabitants of Orchoe and of the district surrounding it. We know now that this country was ruled in very early times by a Chaldæan race, some of the kings of which Berosus has recorded (Rawlinson, in Athenæum, 1854, No. 1,377; Euseb., 'Præpar. Evang.,' ix., 17). It is worthy of notice that Eusebius has preserved an ancient fragment from Eupolemus, who speaks of a city of Babylonia, Camarina, 'which some call Urie.' As the Assyrian name of Warka is written with a monogram, which signifies the moon,' and as the name Camarina would naturally be MAY, 1867.

F