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 over the Dead Sea. The legend of Lot's wife he carefully avoided, for he knew too well the danger of ridicule in France.
As long as the Napoleonic and Bourbon reigns lasted, and indeed for some time afterward, this kind of dealing with the Holy Land was fashionable, and we have a long series of men, especially of Frenchmen, who evidently received their impulse from Chateaubriand.
About 1831 De Geramb, Abbot of La Trappe, evidently a very noble and devout spirit, sees vapour above the Dead Sea, but stretches the truth a little—speaking of it as "vapour or smoke." He could not find the salt statue, and complains of the "diversity of stories regarding it." The simple physical cause of this diversity—the washing out of different statues in different years—never occurs to him; but he comforts himself with the scriptural warrant for the metamorphosis.(441)
(441) For Mariti, see his Voyage, etc., vol. ii, pp. 352-356. For
Tobler's high opinion of him, see the Bibliographia, pp. 132, 133. For
Volney, see his Voyage en Syrie et Egypte, Paris, 1807, vol. i, pp.
308 et seq.; also, for a statement of contributions of the eighteenth
century to geology, Lartet in De Luynes's Mer Morte, vol. iii, p. 12.
For Cornelius Bruyn, see French edition of his works, 1714 (in which his
name is given as "Le Brun"), especially for representations of fossils,
pp. 309, 375. For Chateaubriand, see his Voyage, etc., vol. ii, part
iii. For De Geramb, see his Voyage, vol. ii, pp. 45-47.
But to the honour of scientific men and scientific truth it should be said that even under Napoleon and the Bourbons there were men who continued to explore, observe, and describe with the simple love of truth as truth, and in spite of the probability that their researches would be received during their lifetime with contempt and even hostility, both in church and state.
The pioneer in this work of the nineteenth century was the German naturalist Ulrich Seetzen. He began his main investigation in 1806, and soon his learning, courage, and honesty threw a flood of new light into the Dead Sea questions.
In this light, myth and legend faded more rapidly than ever. Typical of his method is his examination of the Dead Sea fruit. He found, on reaching Palestine, that Josephus's story regarding it, which had been accepted for nearly two thousand years, was believed on all sides; more than this, he found that the original myth had so grown that a multitude of respectable people at Bethlehem and elsewhere assured him that not only apples, but pears, pomegranates, figs, lemons, and many other fruits which grow upon the shores of the Dead Sea, though beautiful to look upon, were filled with ashes. These good people declared to Seetzen that they had seen these fruits, and that, not long before, a basketful of them which had been sent to a merchant of Jaffa had turned to ashes.
Seetzen was evidently perplexed by this mass of testimony and naturally anxious to examine these fruits. On arriving at the sea he began to look for them, and the guide soon showed him the "apples." These he found to be simply an asclepia, which had been described by Linnaeus, and which is found in the East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, Jamaica, and elsewhere—the "ashes" being simply seeds. He looked next for the other fruits, and the guide soon found for him the "lemons": these he discovered to be a species of solanum found in other parts of Palestine and elsewhere, and the seeds in these were the famous "cinders." He looked next for the pears, figs, and other accursed fruits; but, instead of finding them filled with ashes and cinders, he found them like the same fruits in other lands, and he tells us that he ate the figs with much pleasure.
So perished a myth which had been kept alive two thousand years,—partly by modes of thought natural to theologians, partly by the self-interest of guides, and partly by the love of marvel-mongering among travellers.