To review it briefly: in the very first years of the century
Maraldi showed the Paris Academy of Sciences fossil fishes found in
the Lebanon region; a little later, Cornelius Bruyn, in the French
edition of his Eastern travels, gave well-drawn representations of
fossil fishes and shells, some of them from the region of the Dead
Sea; about the middle of the century Richard Pococke, Bishop of
Meath, and Korte of Altona made more statements of the same sort;
and toward the close of the century, as we have seen, Volney gave
still more of these researches, with philosophical deductions from them.
The result of all this was that there gradually dawned upon
thinking men the conviction that, for ages before the appearance of
man on the planet, and during all the period since his appearance,
natural laws have been steadily in force in Palestine as elsewhere;
this conviction obliged men to consider other than supernatural
causes for the phenomena of the Dead Sea, and myth and marvel
steadily shrank in value.
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