e two masses of water are not mingled. As to
the salt statue of Lot's wife, he declares it to be still existing; and,
copying a table of indulgences granted by the Church to pious pilgrims,
he puts down the visit to the salt statue as giving an indulgence of
seven years.

Toward the end of the century we have another traveller yet more
influential: Bernard of Breydenbach, Dean of Mainz. His book of travels
was published in 1486, at the famous press of Schoeffer, and in various
translations it was spread through Europe, exercising an influence wide
and deep. His first important notice of the Dead Sea is as follows: "In
this, Tirus the serpent is found, and from him the Tiriac medicine is
made. He is blind, and so full of venom that there is no remedy for
his bite except cutting off the bitten part. He can only be taken by
striking him and making him angry; then his venom flies into his head
and tail." Breydenbach calls the Dead Sea "the chimney of hell," and
repeats the old story as to the miraculous solvent for its bitumen.
He, too, makes the statement that the holy water of the Jordan does not
mingle with the accursed water of the infernal sea, but increases the
miracle which Caumont had announced by saying that, although the waters
appear to come together, the Jordan is really absorbed in the earth
before it reaches the sea.

As to Lot's wife, various travellers at that time had various fortunes.
Some, like Caumont and Breydenbach, took her continued existence for
granted; some, like Count John of Solms, saw her and were greatly
edified; some, like Hans Werli, tried to find her and could not, but,
like St. Silvia, a thousand years before, were none the less edified by
the idea that, for some inscrutable purpose, the sea had been allowed to
hide her from them; some found her larger than they expected, even forty
feet high, as was the salt pillar which happened to be standing at the
visit of Commander Lynch in 1848; but this only added a new proof to the
miracle, for the text was remembered, "There were giants in those days."

Out of the mass of works of pilgrims during the fifteenth century I
select just one more as typical of the theological view then dominant,
and this is the noted book of Felix Fabri, a preaching friar of Ulm. I
select him, because even so eminent an authority in our own time as Dr.
Edward Robinson declares him to have been the most thorough, thoughtful,
and enlightened traveller of that century.