abstruse reasoning, and because all controversy regarding it
is ended. There is certainly now no theologian with a reputation to lose
who will venture to revive the idea regarding it which was sanctioned
for hundreds, nay, thousands, of years by theology, was based on
Scripture, and was held by the universal Church until our own century.

The main feature of the salt region of Usdum is a low range of hills
near the southwest corner of the Dead Sea, extending in a southeasterly
direction for about five miles, and made up mainly of salt rock. This
rock is soft and friable, and, under the influence of the heavy winter
rains, it has been, without doubt, from a period long before human
history, as it is now, cut ever into new shapes, and especially into
pillars or columns, which sometimes bear a resemblance to the human
form.

An eminent clergyman who visited this spot recently speaks of the
appearance of this salt range as follows:

"Fretted by fitful showers and storms, its ridge is exceedingly uneven,
its sides carved out and constantly changing;... and each traveller
might have a new pillar of salt to wonder over at intervals of a few
years."(428)

(428) As to the substance of the "pillars" or "statues" or "needles" of
salt at Usdum, many travellers speak of it as "marl and salt." Irby and
Mangles, in their Travels in Egypt, Nubia, Syria, and the Holy Land,
chap. vii, call it "salt and hardened sand." The citation as to frequent
carving out of new "pillars" is from the Travels in Palestine of the
Rev. H. F. Osborn, D. D.; see also Palmer, Desert of the Exodus, vol ii,
pp. 478, 479. For engravings of the salt pillar at different times,
compare that given by Lynch in 1848, when it appeared as a column forty
feet high, with that given by Palmer as the frontpiece to his Desert of
the Exodus, Cambridge, England, 1871, when it was small and "does
really bear a curious resemblance to an Arab woman with a child upon
he shoulders", and this again with the picture of the salt formation at
Usdum given by Canon Tristram, at whose visit there was neither "pillar"
nor "statue." See The Land of Israel, by H. B. Tristram, D. D., F. R.
S., London, 1882, p. 324. For similar pillars of salt washed out from
the mud at Catalonia, see Lyell.

Few things could be more certain than that, in the indolent dream-life
of the East, myths and legends would grow up to account for this as
for other strange appearances in all that region.