proportion to the number of their cattle.

`The course of procedure is then as follows: the Khateeb, or Mohammedan

religious teacher, who is also the scribe, recorder, and accountant of the

place, presides at this gathering.  He first writes down the names of all

who desire to plough, and against each man's name enters the number of

ploughs that he intends to work.  The farmers now form themselves into

several equal groups, generally making up ten ploughs in a group, each of

which chooses one of their number to represent them.  If there are forty

men who desire to farm, making up amongst them sixty ploughs, they will

divide themselves into six parties of ten ploughs each, represented by six

chiefs.  The whole of the land is then parcelled out into six equal parts,

one for each group of farmers, by the six elected chiefs.  The land being

in most instances of various qualities, some very good, some much poorer,

and some comparatively bad, has to be chosen from different and often

distant parts to form each of the six several parcels.  Although there are

no hedges, ditches, or walls, the tillage is all divided into portions

somewhat answering to our fields, marked off from one another by rough

natural boundaries, each bearing a name, such as "the field of the

partridge", "the field of the mother of mice", etc.  It would seem to have

been the same in ancient times, for we read of "the fuller's field" and

"the potter's field", the latter called afterwards, on account of its

purchase with the thirty pieces of silver given to Judas as the price of

Messiah's betrayal, by the tragic name of "the bloody field", Aceldama

(Acts 1:19).

`The six representatives, having parcelled out the land, now cast lots for

its distribution.  Each of them give some object to the presiding Khateeb,

such as a stone or a piece of wood, and he puts them into a bag.  The

Khateeb then asks to whom one of the six parcels of ground which he names

is to belong, and a little boy, chosen to draw out the objects from the

bag, puts in his hand, and the ground in question is adjudged to the party

represented by the chief who gave the stone or other object which the

child brings out.  A very young child is generally chosen for this

purpose, in order that there may be no collusion.  When the six divisions

are thus allotted they are again subdivided, in the case of each party,

amongst the ten ploughs in a similar way.  For this purpose each field of

each parcel is divided into ten equal strips, which are now generally, on

the mountains, measured out roughly with an ox-goad, about eight feet

long.  On the plains they use for this purpose a rope about twice the

length of the ox-goad, made of goat's hair, about half an inch thick,

called hhabaleh, evidently the Hebrew hhevel, "rope", or "measuring line".

Each of these strips is called a maress, from the Arabic meeras,

"inheritance" or "allotted portion" (or, as some say, from maras, "cable",

a collective plural from marasah, "rope").  The fields are taken

separately, and the ten mawaress, or strips, are apportioned amongst the

ten ploughs by lot.  The owner of two ploughs, for instance, would get

one-fifth of each field in his sixth division of the land, and the owner

of one plough one-tenth.  A man with two weak oxen who can only plough

half a day is set down at half a plough, and gets one-twentieth of each

field; and another who can only plough for a quarter of a day receives

one-fortieth.  Each farmer then pays the proportion of the land-tax due on

the strips of land allotted to him'.

Instead, therefore of questioning the use of the word `lot' to indicate

our inheritance, it would be difficult with such a background to avoid it.