-like fossils are
explained as being fruits refused to him by its owner, who was punished
by having them turned to stone. Elisha was stationed here for a time.
Tacitus describes the hill as the site of an oracle, which Vespasian
consulted. Iamblichus in his life of Pythagoras speaks of it as a place
of great sanctity forbidden to the vulgar. A grove of trees, called the
"Trees of the Forty" [Martyrs], still remains, no doubt in former times
a sacred grove. So early as the 4th century Christian hermits began to
settle here, and in 1207 the Carmelite order was organized. The
monastery, founded at the fountain of Elijah in 1209, has had many
vicissitudes: the monks were slaughtered or driven to Europe in 1238 and
the building decayed; it was visited and refounded by St Louis in 1252;
again despoiled in 1291; once more rebuilt in 1631, and, in 1635 (when
the monks were massacred), sacked and turned into a mosque. Once more
the monks established themselves, only to be murdered after Napoleon's
retreat in 1799. The church and the monastery were entirely destroyed in
1821 by 'Abd Allah, pasha of Acre, on the plea that the monks would
favour the revolting Greeks; but it was shortly afterwards rebuilt by
order from the Porte, partly at 'Abd Allah's expense and partly by
contributions raised in Europe, Asia and Africa by Brother Giovanni
Battista of Frascati. The villages with which the mountain was once
covered have been to a large extent depopulated by the Druses.
(R. A. S. M.)

CARMELITES, in England called White Friars (from the white mantle over a
brown habit), one of the four mendicant orders. The stories concerning
the origin of this order, seriously put forward and believed in the 17th
and 18th centuries, are one of the curiosities of history. It was
asserted that Elias established a community of hermits on Mount Carmel,
and that this community existed without break until the Christian era
and was nothing else than a Jewish Carmelite order, to which belonged
the Sons of the Prophets and the Essenes. Members of it were present at
St Peter's first sermon on Pentecost and were converted, and built a
chapel on Mount Carmel in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who, as
well as the apostles, enrolled herself in the order. In 1668 the
Bollandist Daniel Papenbroek (1628-1714), in the March volumes of the
_Acta Sanctorum_, rejected these stories as fables. A controversy arose
and the Carmelites had recourse to the Inqui