the whole body.

In 1555, Gabriel Giraudet, priest at Puy, journeyed through Palestine.
His faith was robust, and his attitude toward the myths of the Dead
Sea is seen by his declaration that its waters are so foul that one can
smell them at a distance of three leagues; that straw, hay, or feathers
thrown into them will sink, but that iron and other metals will float;
that criminals have been kept in them three or four days and could not
drown. As to Lot's wife, he says that he found her "lying there, her
back toward heaven, converted into salt stone; for I touched her,
scratched her, and put a piece of her into my mouth, and she tasted
salt."

At the centre of all these legends we see, then, the idea that,
though there were no living beasts in the Dead Sea, the people of the
overwhelmed cities were still living beneath its waters, probably in
hell; that there was life in the salt statue; and that it was still
curious regarding its old neighbours.

Hence such travellers in the latter years of the century as Count Albert
of Lowenstein and Prince Nicolas Radziwill are not at all weakened
in faith by failing to find the statue. What the former is capable of
believing is seen by his statement that in a certain cemetery at Cairo
during one night in the year the dead thrust forth their feet, hands,
limbs, and even rise wholly from their graves.

There seemed, then, no limit to these pious beliefs. The idea that
there is merit in credulity, with the love of myth-making and
miracle-mongering, constantly made them larger. Nor did the Protestant
Reformation diminish them at first; it rather strengthened them and
fixed them more firmly in the popular mind. They seemed destined to last
forever. How they were thus strengthened at first, under Protestantism,
and how they were finally dissolved away in the atmosphere of scientific
thought, will now be shown.(435)

(435) For Father Anselm, see his Descriptio Terrae Sanctae, in H.
Canisius, Thesaurus Monument Eccles., Basnage edition, Amsterdam, 1725,
vol. iv, p. 788. For Giraudet, see his Discours du Voyage d'Outre-Mer,
Paris, 1585, p. 56a. For Radziwill and Lowenstein, see the Reyssbuch,
especially p. 198a.

III. POST-REFORMATION CULMINATION OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS.--BEGINNINGS
OF A HEALTHFUL SCEPTICISM.

The first effect of the Protestant Reformation was to popularize the
older Dead Sea legends, and to make the public mind still more receptive
for the newer