course the new science was hampered and its scholars insulted. In 1788 James Beattie declared the new science "degrading to our nature;" in 1804 Dr. Adam Clarke made severe strictures upon it. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the new science was already accepted definitely in Germany, English theologians and theologasters continued to ridicule and denounce comparative philology. Even in these latter days Mr. Gladstone, so commanding a statesman, so pitifully feeble in religion, has made, says Dr. White, "an assertion regarding the results of philology which no philologist of any standing could admit, and then escapes in a cloud of rhetoric after his well-known fashion." It may be ranked with Lord Salisbury's pleasantries on biological evolution, Mr. Balfour on naturalistic ethics, the Duke of Argyll on ethnology, and Miss Marie Corelli on atomism. However, to-day the evolutionary theory of language is accepted; the Babel theory is as dead as the deluge. The last ironical page in this chapter of controversy is more pitiful than in the case of the other Judaeo-Babylonian myths. The translation of the original Babylonian myth by Oppert, Sayce, and Schrader, and its comparison with Genesis xi. 1-9, makes it clear that the "confusion of tongues" is not even Babylonian, but is due to a conscious or unconscious jeu de mots of the Hebrew transcriber. Bab-el means "Gate of God," and the tower of Babel would be so called as supporting an altar to the God (in the sky), besides serving astronomical purposes. But the Hebrew writer has mistaken it for the Hebrew word "to confound," and built his myth thereupon—with the help of a Hindu legend.
Finally, we must mention the struggle of science and theology over the Dead Sea. Scepticism with regard to the Scripture version of the fate of Lot's wife, and its explanation of the peculiar properties of the Dead Sea, had begun in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth travellers began to ridicule the salt statue which was pointed out by guides as the salicized relic of Lot's wife, and to tone down the exaggerated descriptions of the Dead Sea which were current in Europe. In 1806 Ulrich Seetzen began the serious investigation of the Dead Sea. The fruit of the region, which vast numbers of common Christians (and many of their pastors) still believe to be fair to look upon, but full of
