59 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Of the great mass of pious legends they are shy enough, but that 

 of Lot's wife, as a rule, they seem never to have heard of, and, if 

 they do allude to it, they simply cover the whole subject with a 

 haze of conventionality and sacred rhetoric* 



Naturally, under this state of things, there has followed the 

 usual attempt to throw off from Christendom the responsibility 

 of the old belief, and in 1887 came a curious effort of this sort. 

 In that year appeared the Rev. Dr. Cunningham Geikie's valu- 

 able work on " The Holy Land and the Bible." In it he makes the 

 following statement as to the salt formation at Usdum : " Here and 

 there, hardened portions of salt, withstanding the water, while all 

 around them melts and wears off, rise up isolated pillars, one of 

 which bears among the Arabs the name of Lot's wife." 



In the light of the previous history, there is something at once 

 pathetic and comical in this attempt to throw the myth upon 

 the shoulders of the poor Arabs. The myth was not originated 

 by Mohammedans ; it appears, as we have seen, first among the 

 Jews, and, I need hardly remind the reader, comes out in the 

 Book of Wisdom and in Josephus, and has been steadily main- 

 tained by fathers, martyrs, and doctors of the Church, by at least 

 one pope, and by innumerable bishops, priests, monks, commenta- 

 tors, and travelers, Catholic and Protestant, ever since. In thus 

 throwing the responsibility of the myth upon the Arabs Dr. 

 Geikie appears to show both the " perf ervid genius " of his coun- 

 trymen and their incapacity to recognize a joke. 



Nor is he more happy in his rationalistic explanations of the 

 whole mass of myths. He supposes a terrific storm, in which the 

 lightning kindled the combustible materials of the cities, aided 

 perhaps by an earthquake ; but this shows a disposition to break 

 away from the exact statements of the sacred books which would 

 have been most severely condemned by the universal Church 

 during at least eighteen hundred years of its history. Nor would 

 the explanations of Sir William Dawson have fared any better : 

 it is very doubtful whether either of them could escape unscathed 

 to-day from a synod of the Free Church of Scotland, or of any of 

 the leading orthodox bodies in the Southern States of the Ameri- 

 can Union, f 



* The only notice of the Lot's wife legend in the editions of Robinson at my command 

 is a very curious one by Leopold von Buch, the eminent geologist. Robinson, with a fear- 

 lessness which does him credit, consulted Von Buch, who in his answer was evidently in- 

 clined to make things easy for Robinson by hinting that Lot was so much struck with the 

 salt formations that he imagined that his wife had been changed into salt. On this theory 

 Robinson makes no comment. See Robinson, " Biblical Researches in Palestine," etc., 

 London, 1841, vol. ii, p. 674. 



f For these most recent explanations, see Rev. Cunningham Geikie, D. D., in work cited ; 

 also Sir J. W. Dawson, "Egypt and Syria," published by the Religious Tract Society, 1887, 

 pp. 125, 126. 



