ious one by Leopold von Buch, the
eminent geologist. Robinson, with a fearlessness which does him credit,
consulted Von Buch, who in his answer was evidently inclined to make
things easier for Robinson by hinting that Lot was so much struck by
the salt formations that HE IMAGINED that his wife had been changed into
salt. On this theory, Robinson makes no comment. See Robinson, Biblical
Researches in Palestine, etc., London, 1841, vol. ii, p. 674.

Naturally, under this state of things, there has followed the usual
attempt to throw off from Christendom the responsibility of the old
belief, and in 1887 came a curious effort of this sort. In that year
appeared the Rev. Dr. Cunningham Geikie's valuable work on The Holy Land
and the Bible. In it he makes the following statement as to the
salt formation at Usdum: "Here and there, hardened portions of salt
withstanding the water, while all around them melts and wears off, rise
up isolated pillars, one of which bears among the Arabs the name of
'Lot's wife.'"

In the light of the previous history, there is something at once
pathetic and comical in this attempt to throw the myth upon the
shoulders of the poor Arabs. The myth was not originated by Mohammedans;
it appears, as we have seen, first among the Jews, and, I need hardly
remind the reader, comes out in the Book of Wisdom and in Josephus, and
has been steadily maintained by fathers, martyrs, and doctors of the
Church, by at least one pope, and by innumerable bishops, priests,
monks, commentators, and travellers, Catholic and Protestant, ever
since. In thus throwing the responsibility of the myth upon the Arabs
Dr. Geikie appears to show both the "perfervid genius" of his countrymen
and their incapacity to recognise a joke.

Nor is he more happy in his rationalistic explanations of the whole mass
of myths. He supposes a terrific storm, in which the lightning kindled
the combustible materials of the cities, aided perhaps by an earthquake;
but this shows a disposition to break away from the exact statements of
the sacred books which would have been most severely condemned by the
universal Church during at least eighteen hundred years of its history.
Nor would the explanations of Sir William Dawson have fared any better:
it is very doubtful whether either of them could escape unscathed today
from a synod of the Free Church of Scotland, or of any of the leading
orthodox bodies in the Southern States of the American Union.(4