The celebrated lake which occupies the site of Sodom and Gomorrah is called in Scripture the Dead Sea. Among the Greeks and Latins it is known by the name of Asphaltites; the Arabs denominate it Bahar Loth, or Sea of Lot. M. de Chateaubriand does not agree with those who conclude it to be the crater of a volcano; for, having seen Vesuvius, Solfatara, the Peak of the Azores, and the extinguished volcanoes of Auvergne, he remarked in all of them the same characters; that is to say, mountains excavated in the form of a tunnel, lava, and ashes, which exhibited incontestable proof of the agency of fire. The Salt Sea, on the contrary, is a lake of great length, curved like a bow, placed between two ranges of mountains, which have no mutual coherence of form, no similarity of composition. They do not meet at the two extremities of the lake; but while the one continues to bound the valley of Jordan, and to run northward as far as Tiberias, the other stretches away to the south till it loses itself in the sands of Yemen. There are, it is true, hot springs, quantities of bitumen, sulphur, and asphaltos; but these of themselves are not sufficient to attest the previous existence of a volcano. With respect, indeed, to the ingulfed cities, if we adopt the idea of Michaelis and of Büsching, physics may be admitted to explain the catastrophe without offence to religion. According to their views, Sodom was built upon a mine of bitumen,--a fact which is ascertained by the testimony of Moses and Josephus, who speak of wells of naphtha in the Valley of Siddim. Lightning kindled the combustible mass, and the guilty cities sank in the subterraneous conflagration. Malte Brun ingeniously suggests that Sodom and Gomorrah themselves may have been built of bituminous stones, and thus have been set in flames by the fire from heaven.