eresting
recent notes. For the above discussion, see Plantin edition, vol. ii,
pp. 758 et seq., and Venice edition, vol. ii, pp. 572-574. As to the
effect of Quaresmio on the Protestant Church, see Wedelius, De Statua
Salis, Jenae, 1692, pp.6, 7, and elsewhere. For Eugene Roger, see his La
Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664; the map, showing various sites referred to,
is in the preface; and for basilisks, salamanders, etc., see pp. 89-92,
139, 218, and elsewhere.

Not only were these views demonstrated, so far as theologico-scientific
reasoning could demonstrate anything, but it was clearly shown, by a
continuous chain of testimony from the earliest ages, that the salt
statue at Usdum had been recognised as the body of Lot's wife by Jews,
Mohammedans, and the universal Christian Church, "always, everywhere,
and by all."

Under the influence of teachings like these--and of the winter
rains--new wonders began to appear at the salt pillar. In 1661 the
Franciscan monk Zwinner published his travels in Palestine, and gave not
only most of the old myths regarding the salt statue, but a new one, in
some respects more striking than any of the old--for he had heard that a
dog, also transformed into salt, was standing by the side of Lot's wife.

Even the more solid Benedictine scholars were carried away, and we find
in the Sacred History by Prof. Mezger, of the order of St. Benedict,
published in 1700, a renewal of the declaration that the salt statue
must be a "PERPETUAL memorial."

But it was soon evident that the scientific current was still working
beneath this ponderous mass of theological authority. A typical evidence
of this we find in 1666 in the travels of Doubdan, a canon of St. Denis.
As to the Dead Sea, he says that he saw no smoke, no clouds, and no
"black, sticky water"; as to the statue of Lot's wife, he says, "The
moderns do not believe so easily that she has lasted so long"; then, as
if alarmed at his own boldness, he concedes that the sea MAY be black
and sticky in the middle; and from Lot's wife he escapes under cover of
some pious generalities. Four years later another French ecclesiastic,
Jacques Goujon, referring in his published travels to the legends of
the salt pillar, says: "People may believe these stories as much as
they choose; I did not see it, nor did I go there." So, too, in
1697, Morison, a dignitary of the French Church, having travelled in
Palestine, confesses that, as to the story of the pillar of