acuteness of thought and
vigour of style secured general attention. In these, myth and legend
were thrown aside, and we have an account simply dictated by the love of
truth as truth. He, too, keeps the torch of science burning by applying
his geological knowledge to the regions which he traverses.

As we look back over the eighteenth century we see mingled with the new
current of thought, and strengthening it, a constantly increasing stream
of more strictly scientific observation and reflection.

To review it briefly: in the very first years of the century Maraldi
showed the Paris Academy of Sciences fossil fishes found in the Lebanon
region; a little later, Cornelius Bruyn, in the French edition of his
Eastern travels, gave well-drawn representations of fossil fishes and
shells, some of them from the region of the Dead Sea; about the middle
of the century Richard Pococke, Bishop of Meath, and Korte of Altona
made more statements of the same sort; and toward the close of the
century, as we have seen, Volney gave still more of these researches,
with philosophical deductions from them.

The result of all this was that there gradually dawned upon thinking
men the conviction that, for ages before the appearance of man on the
planet, and during all the period since his appearance, natural laws
have been steadily in force in Palestine as elsewhere; this conviction
obliged men to consider other than supernatural causes for the phenomena
of the Dead Sea, and myth and marvel steadily shrank in value.

But at the very threshold of the nineteenth century Chateaubriand came
into the field, and he seemed to banish the scientific spirit, though
what he really did was to conceal it temporarily behind the vapours
of his rhetoric. The time was propitious for him. It was the period of
reaction after the French Revolution, when what was called religion was
again in fashion, and when even atheists supported it as a good thing
for common people: of such an epoch Chateaubriand, with his superficial
information, thin sentiment, and showy verbiage, was the foreordained
prophet. His enemies were wont to deny that he ever saw the Holy Land;
whether he did or not, he added nothing to real knowledge, but simply
threw a momentary glamour over the regions he described, and especially
over the Dead Sea. The legend of Lot's wife he carefully avoided, for he
knew too well the danger of ridicule in France.

As long as the Napoleonic and Bourbon reig