having at once before them a
brief abstract of all he performed for geography, may the better be enabled
to appreciate his merits.

Soon after his second return to Cairo, he resolved to penetrate into
Arabia, and to visit Mecca and Medina. In order to secure his own safety,
and at the same time gain such information as could alone be obtained in
the character of a Mahomedan, he assumed the dress, and he was enabled to
personate the religion, manners, and language of the native Hadje, or
pilgrims. Thus secure and privileged, he resided between four and five
months in Mecca. Here he gained some authentic and curious information
respecting the rise, history, and tenets of the Wahabees, a Mahomedan sect.
These travels have not yet been published.

The last excursion of Mr. Burckhardt was from Cairo to Mount Sinai and the
eastern head of the Red Sea. This journey was published in 1822, along with
the travels in Syria and the Holy Land; the latter of which he accomplished
while he was preparing himself at Aleppo for his proposed journey into the
interior of Africa. These travels, therefore, are prior in date to those in
Nubia, though they were published afterwards.

He spent nearly three, years in Syria: his most important geographical
discoveries in this country relate to the nature of the district between
the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Elana; the extent, conformation, and detailed
topography of the Haouran; the situation of Apanea on the river Orontes,
which was one of the most important cities of Syria under the Macedonian
Greeks; the site of Petreea; and the general structure of the peninsula of
Mount Sinai. Perhaps the most original and important of these illustrations
of ancient geography is that which relates to the Elanitic Gulph: its
extent and form were previously so little known, that it was either
entirely omitted, or very erroneously laid down in maps. From what he
observed here, there is good reason to believe that the Jordan once
discharged itself into the Red Sea; thus confirming the truth of that
convulsion mentioned and described in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis,
which interrupted the coarse of this river; converted the plain in which
Sodom and Gomorrah stood into a lake, and changed the valley to the
southward of this district into a sandy desert.

But Mr. Burckhardt, considering all these excursions, and their consequent
numerous and important accessions to geographical knowledge, as only
preludes to