salt, he has
difficulty in believing it.

The same current is observed working still more strongly in the
travels of the Rev. Henry Maundrell, an English chaplain at Aleppo, who
travelled through Palestine during the same year. He pours contempt over
the legends of the Dead Sea in general: as to the story that birds could
not fly over it, he says that he saw them flying there; as to the utter
absence of life in the sea, he saw small shells in it; he saw no traces
of any buried cities; and as to the stories regarding the statue of
Lot's wife and the proposal to visit it, he says, "Nor could we give
faith enough to these reports to induce us to go on such an errand."

The influence of the Baconian philosophy on his mind is very clear; for,
in expressing his disbelief in the Dead Sea apples, with their contents
of ashes, he says that he saw none, and he cites Lord Bacon in support
of scepticism on this and similar points.

But the strongest effect of this growing scepticism is seen near the end
of that century, when the eminent Dutch commentator Clericus (Le Clerc)
published his commentary on the Pentateuch and his Dissertation on the
Statue of Salt.

At great length he brings all his shrewdness and learning to bear
against the whole legend of the actual transformation of Lot's wife and
the existence of the salt pillar, and ends by saying that "the whole
story is due to the vanity of some and the credulity of more."

In the beginning of the eighteenth century we find new tributaries
to this rivulet of scientific thought. In 1701 Father Felix Beaugrand
dismisses the Dead Sea legends and the salt statue very curtly and
dryly--expressing not his belief in it, but a conventional wish to
believe.

In 1709 a scholar appeared in another part of Europe and of different
faith, who did far more than any of his predecessors to envelop the Dead
Sea legends in an atmosphere of truth--Adrian Reland, professor at the
University of Utrecht. His work on Palestine is a monument of patient
scholarship, having as its nucleus a love of truth as truth: there is
no irreverence in him, but he quietly brushes away a great mass of myths
and legends: as to the statue of Lot's wife, he treats it warily, but
applies the comparative method to it with killing effect, by showing
that the story of its miraculous renewal is but one among many of its
kind.(438)

(438) For Zwinner, see his Blumenbuch des Heyligen Landes, Munchen,
1661, p. 45