Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/609

Rh period a circular column of friable salt rock, about forty feet high; yet, while he accepts every other old myth, he declares the belief that this was once the wife of Lot "a superstition."

One little circumstance added enormously to the influence of this book, for, as a frontispiece, he inserted a picture of the salt column. It was delineated in rather a poetic manner; light streamed upon it, heavy clouds hung above it, and as a background were ranged buttresses of salt rock, furrowed and channeled out by the winter rains: this salt statue picture was spread far and wide, and in thousands of country pulpits and Sunday schools it was shown as a tribute of science to Scripture.

Nor was this influence confined to American Sunday-school children, for Lynch had innocently set a trap into which several European theologians stumbled. One of these was Dr. Lorenz Gratz, Vicar-General of Augsburg, a theological professor. In the second edition of his "Theatre of the Holy Scriptures," published in 1858, he hails Lynch's discovery of the salt pillar with joy; forgets his allusion to the old theory regarding it as a superstition; and does not stop to learn that this was one of a succession of statues washed out yearly by the rains, but accepts it as the original Lot's wife.

The French churchmen suffered most. About two years after Lynch, De Saulcy visits the Dead Sea to explore it thoroughly, evidently in the interest of sacred science—and of his own promotion. Of the modest thoroughness of Robinson there is no trace in his writings. He promptly discovered the overwhelmed cities, which no one before or since has ever found, poured contempt on other investigators, and threw over his whole work an air of piety. But, unfortunately, having a Frenchman's dread of ridicule, he attempted to give a rationalistic explanation of what he calls "the enormous needles of salt washed out by the winter rain," and their connection with the Lot's wife myth, and declared his firm belief that she, "being delayed by curiosity or terror, was crushed by a rock which rolled down from the mountain, and when Lot and his children turned about they saw at the place where she had been only the rock of salt which covered her body."

But this would not do at all, and an eminent ecclesiastic privately and publicly expostulated with De Saulcy—very naturally declaring that "it was not Lot who wrote the book of Genesis."

The result was that another edition of De Saulcy's work was published by a Church Book Society, with the offending passage omitted; but a passage was retained really far more suggestive of heterodoxy, and this was an Arab legend accounting for the origin of certain rocks near the Dead Sea curiously resembling salt formations; this in effect ran as follows: