Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/597

Rh a fluid resembling blood oozing from the rocks about the Dead Sea, and cites authorities to prove that the statue of Lot's wife still exists and gives signs of life.

Yet, as we near the end of the sixteenth century, some evidences of a healthful and fruitful skepticism begin to appear.

The old stream of travelers, commentators, and preachers, accepting tradition and repeating what they have been told, flows on; but here and there we are refreshed by the sight of a man who really begins to think and look for himself.

First among these is the French naturalist Pierre Bélon. As regards the ordinary wonders, he has the simple faith of his time. Among a multitude of similar things, he believed that he saw the stones on which the disciples were sleeping during the prayer of Christ, the stone on which the Lord sat when he raised Lazarus from the dead, the Lord's footprints on the stone from which he ascended into heaven, and, most curious of all, "the stone which the builders rejected." Yet he makes some advance on his predecessors, since he shows in one passage that he had thought out the process by which the simpler myths of Palestine were made. For, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, he sees a field covered with small pebbles, and of these he says: "The common people tell you that a man was once sowing peas there, when Our Lady passed that way and asked him what he was doing; the man answered, f I am sowing pebbles/ and straightway all the peas were changed into these little stones."

His ascribing belief in this explanatory transformation-myth to the "common people" marks the faint dawn of a new epoch.

Typical also of this new class is the German botanist Leonhard Rauwolf. He travels through Palestine in 1575, and, though devout and at times credulous, notes comparatively few of the old wonders, while he makes thoughtful and careful mention of things in nature that he really saw; he declines to use the eyes of the monks, and steadily uses his own to good purpose.

As we go on in the seventeenth century, this current of new thought is yet more evident; a habit of observing more carefully and of comparing observations had set in; the great voyages of discovery by Columbus, Yasco Da Gama, Magellan, and others were producing their effect, and this effect was increased by the inductive philosophy of Bacon, the reasonings of Descartes, and the suggestions of Montaigne.

So evident was this current that, as far back as the early days of the century, a great theologian, Quaresmio, of Lodi, had made up his mind to stop it forever. In 1616, therefore, he began his ponderous work entitled "The Historical, Theological, and Moral Explanation of the Holy Land." He labored upon it for nine years, gave nine years more to perfecting it, and then put it