The present _questio vexata_ of these sacred localities occupies some space in the journals of M. Van de Velde. This controversy, originating in the real or alleged discoveries of M. de Saulcy, calls up one of the most remote and mysterious events ever brought under human discussion—the destruction of the cities of the plain, Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim. The original idea, touching these guilty objects of the Divine wrath, wrapt in awe and mystery as their fate was, seems to have been, that the Dead Sea, itself the gloomiest and most appalling object in creation, had been called into existence by the same miracle which annihilated the condemned cities, and that its deadly waters swept every trace of them out of sight for ever. But modern travel has taken from the Dead Sea much of its mysterious desolation; it is found that sweet fountains spring, and luxuriant vegetation flourishes, within sight of its waters, and that itself bears no evident trace of its deadly qualities, but appears, as one and another of its visitors say, only a “splendid lake,” an inland sea, mirroring clear skies and picturesque mountains, sublime, but not terrible. Traces of the most frightful convulsions of nature surround it on every side; extinct volcanoes and tremendous chasms, mountains dislocated and shattered in pieces, and tracts of unparalleled desolation; but still it is impossible to regard the lake itself as the fatal object which former ideas held it to be. As the subject clears from the superstitious veneration of less informed times, a new theory is propounded. Near the end of the present Dead Sea, a peninsula strikes into the water, almost cutting off into a separate lake the southmost portion of the sea. This portion, beyond the promontory El-Lisan, is found to be extremely shallow, and in more than one spot fordable, presenting a striking contrast, in this particular, to the main body of the water, which reaches the depth of 1300 feet. This shallow end of the lake, guarded by its broad peninsula, Dr Robinson, the eminent American traveller, takes to be an inundated plain; in other words, the vale of Siddim, the ancient site of the condemned cities. According to the Scripture narrative, the soil of this fertile valley was “full of slime-pits,” a bituminous underground to the surface of tropical luxuriance; and Dr Robinson’s theory holds, that the fire which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah broke up the superficial soil, ignited the bitumen, and lowered the surface of the plain below the level of the lake, which immediately flooded over the sunken valley, and formed the shallow piece of water at the south end of the Dead Sea. A glance at the map will show how the form of the lake justifies this theory, in which many travellers, and among them Lieutenant Van de Velde, fully concur.