NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 591 



period a circular column of friable salt rock, about forty feet 

 high ; yet, while he accepts every other old myth, he declares the 

 belief that this was once the wife of Lot " a superstition." 



One little circumstance added enormously to the influence of 

 this book, for, as a frontispiece, he inserted a picture of the salt 

 column. It was delineated in rather a poetic manner; light 

 streamed upon it, heavy clouds hung above it, and as a back- 

 ground were ranged buttresses of salt rock, furrowed and chan- 

 neled out by the winter rains : this salt statue picture was spread 

 far and wide, and in thousands of country pulpits and Sunday 

 schools it was shown as a tribute of science to Scripture. 



Nor was this influence confined to American Sunday-school 

 children, for Lynch had innocently set a trap into which several 

 European theologians stumbled. One of these was Dr. Lorenz 

 Gratz, Vicar-General of Augsburg, a theological professor. In the 

 second edition of his " Theatre of the Holy Scriptures," published 

 in 1858, he hails Lynch's discovery of the salt pillar with joy ; for- 

 gets his allusion to the old theory regarding it as a superstition ; 

 and does not stop to learn that this was one of a succession of 

 statues washed out yearly by the rains, but accepts it as the origi- 

 nal Lot's wife. 



The French churchmen suffered most. About two years after 

 Lynch, De Saulcy visits the Dead Sea to explore it thoroughly, 

 evidently in the interest of sacred science and of his own pro- 

 motion. Of the modest thoroughness of Robinson there is no 

 trace in his writings. He promptly discovered the overwhelmed 

 cities, which no one before or since has ever found, poured con- 

 tempt on other investigators, and threw over his whole work an 

 air of piety. But, unfortunately, having a Frenchman's dread 

 of ridicule, he attempted to give a rationalistic explanation of 

 what he calls " the enormous needles of salt washed out by the 

 winter rain," and their connection with the Lot's wife myth, and 

 declared his firm belief that she, " being delayed by curiosity or 

 terror, was crushed by a rock which rolled down from the mount- 

 ain, and when Lot and his children turned about they saw at the 

 place where she had been only the rock of salt which covered her 

 body." 



But this would not do at all, and an eminent ecclesiastic pri- 

 vately and publicly expostulated with De Saulcy very naturally 

 declaring that " it was not Lot who wrote the book of Genesis." 



The result was that another edition of De Saulcy's work was 

 published by a Church Book Society, with the offending passage 

 omitted ; but a passage was retained really far more suggestive 

 of heterodoxy, and this was an Arab legend accounting for the 

 origin of certain rocks near the Dead Sea curiously resembling 

 salt formations ; this in effect ran as follows : 



