07 Dec




















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

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