The convent of Mt. Carmel, as alluded to and described by travelers during the last five hundred years is to be understood as denoting not a single building, but a series of buildings, that have risen, flourished, and gone to decay on the same spot, in a long succession, like a dynasty of kings following each other in a line on the same throne. The grottos and caverns which are found upon the mountain began to be occupied at a very early period by hermits and solitary monks, who lived probably at first in a state of separation from each other as well as of seclusion from the world. After a time however they began to combine together, and to live in edifices specially constructed for their use, and for the last thousand years the Carmelites have constituted a well known and numerous religious order, having spread from their original seat and centre to every part of Europe, and taken a very active and important part in the ecclesiastical affairs of modern times. Every religious order of the Roman Church prides itself on the antiquity of its origin, and the traditions of the Carmelites for a long time carried back the history of their society to a very remote period indeed--not merely to the Christian era, but from the time of Christ and the apostles back to Elijah, and from Elijah to Enoch. In discussing this subject, however, one ecclesiastical writer very gravely maintains that the Enoch, if there was one, among the founders of the Carmelite fraternity, could not have been the patriarch Enoch, the father of Methusaleh, since it is plain that there could have been no Carmelite monks among those saved in the ark, at the time of the deluge, for the vow of celibacy was an essential rule of the order from the beginning, and the sons of Noah, who were the only men besides Noah himself that were saved from the flood, were all married men, and took their wives with them when they went into the ark!