Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/51

Rh to the Greeks is this. Concerning a plant called búkásiá, the author adds: “This plant was brought to the climate of Babylon from the country of Ephesus, a city of the Greeks.” It is astonishing that Dr. Chwolson was not struck by such a passage, and that he has ventured to maintain that Ephesus could have been mentioned in a Babylonian document of the 12th century before Christ." It is of little importance whether Ephesus might have existed before that epoch, and even before the colony of Androcles, the son of Codrus, to whom its origin is ordinarily attributed. Criticism which entrenches itself obstinately in possibilities, careless of thus accumulating against itself improbabilities, is undoubtedly irrefutable; but it is no longer criticism. The difficulty which results to Dr. Chwolson by these allusions to the Greeks, which are found in “The Nabathæan Agriculture,” becomes the more grave, from the fact, that the Greeks are mentioned not only