Flowers (Hastings' Dictionary)

Visitors to Palestine unite in their enthusiasm over the flowers. Everywhere they brighten the landscape with their brilliant colours, white, yellow, blue, violet, purple, maroon, crim- son, scarlet, brown, and even black. Fields, many acres in extent, are aglow with anemones, ranun- culi, poppies, chorisporas, silenes, clovers, milk vetches, cnamomiles, groundsels, crocuses, colchi- cums, irises, ixiolirions, gladioli, and tulips.

The hedges are gay with their wealth of broom, roses, and brambles. The sandstone is clothed with pink and white rock, roses, and dainty little heaths. The hillsides are adorned with the lavish blossoms of the styrax, the redbud, the arbutus, and the myrtle, fiven the bleak shingle of alpine Lebanon, 10,000 ft. above the sea, is covered with large patches of Vicia canescens, Lab., and V. grcgana, Boiss. et Held., with their beautiful racemes of blue and white flowers.

The table- land of Moab is gorgeous ^vith deep purple irises. Finally, the deserts have a rich and varied flora, numbering over 400 species, not found in other localities. Flowers are an emblem of beauty (Mt 6®'), butat the same time of frailty and inataoility (Job 14''', Ps 103", Is 28' 40^ Ja l'» etc.) The com- ing of flowers is a sign of spring (Ca 2'^). ' The flower of her age' is the bloom of a maiden's youth (1 Co 1^). G. E. Post.

FLOWERS in Lv IS"-" signifies the menstraal discharge ( Tji, RV ' impurity '). So Andrew, Bruns- wyke's Distyll- Waters, A iii. ' the same water . . causeth women to have her flowers, named men- struum.' In the same sense Fr. fleurs ; but both are now obsolete.