It is about 3,800 years since the disobedient "help-meet" of the Oriental squatter was fixed like a fly in amber, as a solemn warning to recalcitrant spouses for all time. Had the first drip then fallen on to the mound in the Jenolan Caves where now stands "Lot's Wife"? Query. The Jenolan pillar is evidently of slow growth. Each joint, which looks something like fine tallow, may, as the curator facetiously puts it, represent a century of "dripping." In this respect it is unlike the historic pillar whose name it bears. Dr. Kitto, in his very interesting "Daily Biblical Illustrations," says in reference to the latter: "From the nature of the case, and from the peculiarly bituminous and saline character of the locality through which this phenomenon was produced, we must not expect to discover many parallel instances which might be quoted in illustration. Accordingly we find that the illustrative parallels which have been diligently sought out by the old commentators have rarely any real bearing on the subject, being for the most part accounts of people frozen to death and long preserved in that condition uncorrupted in the Boreal regions, or else of persons suffocated and then petrified by the mineral vapours of the caves in which they were hid, or otherwise of persons 'turned to stone,' and found generations after standing in the postures wherein they found their death. The only instance we have met with which seems appropriate, and which rests on the authority of a contemporary of fair credit, is related by Aventinus, who states that in his time about 50 country people, with their cows and calves, were, in Carinthia, destroyed by strong and suffocating saline exhalations which arose out of the earth immediately upon an earthquake in 1348. They were by this reduced to saline statues or pillars, like Lot's wife, and the historian tells us that they had been seen by himself and the Chancellor of Austria."