[3] This sea is called by several names, viz., “The Dead Sea,” “The Sea of the Plain,” or “of the Arabah,” and “The East Sea.” In the 2nd Book of Esdras v. 7, it is called the “Sodomish Sea.” Josephus uses a similar name, ἡ Σοδομύτυς λίμνη—the Sodomite Lake; he also calls it by the same name as Diodorus Siculus, the “Asphaltic Lake”—ἡ Ἀσφαλτίτις λίμνη. It contains 26 per cent. of salt, including large quantities of magnesium compounds; its weight is of course great, a gallon weighing almost 12-1/2 lb.; and its buoyancy is proportionate to the weight, being such that the human body cannot sink in it. At the south side is a mass of crystallised salt, and in it is a very peculiar cavern, extending at least five miles, varying in height from 200 to 400 feet. This sea is 1312 feet below the level of the Mediterranean; the river Jordan, from the Sea of Galilee, flows into it, but no river flows from it. [4] According to C. Velleius Paterculus of Rome, Homer flourished B.C. 968; according to Herodotus, B.C. 884; the Arundelian Marbles fix his era B.C. 907. [5] To show how acute the Greek mind must have been, and how alive the philosophers of that classic country were to everything, whether beautiful or useful, we need only call to mind the quaint observation of Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, who was born about B.C. 300, and who says that “a soul was given to the hog instead of salt, to prevent his body from rotting;” by this we see he was quite cognisant of the preservative properties of salt. [6] Between the Nile and the Red Sea there are quarries of white marble, of porphyry, of basalt, and the beautiful green breccia, known as _Verde d’Egitto_; in the same locality are found gold, iron, lead, emerald, and copper. [7] A learned author states as follows: “We have seen, too, that the earliest state of Egypt, as seen in the pyramids, and in the tombs of the same age, reveals an orderly society and civilisation, of which the origin is unknown.” [8] No doubt they were proud of their African parentage, and looked upon the hoary monarchy of the Nile with a sentiment of religious awe and unfeigned wonder. Baron Bünsen graphically puts it: “Egypt was to the Greeks a sphinx with an intellectual human countenance.” [9] Probably owing to the existence of salt in Western Thibet and in Lahore, a province of Hindostan, also the Indian Salt Range, which stretches in a sigmoid curve, according to the late researches of Mr. Wynne, from Kalabagh on the Indus to a point north of Tank, both the Chinese and Hindoos may have been equally cognisant of its virtues with the Egyptians, especially when we have it recorded that the Celestials procured it by a process not only original but in a certain degree characteristic of Asiatic combination of ingenuity and clumsiness.