Text: N. P. Willis (?), Notice of the American Journal of Science and Art, Weekly Mirror (New York), February 8, 1845, vol. 1, no. 18, p. 286, cols. 1-2

[page 286, column 1:]

THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND ART. Conducted by Professor Silliman, jr. Vol. XLVIII. No. 4. January, 1845.

This ancient chronicle of American Science (the quarterly remembrances of our literary mother Yale College) is just published. We wish that “the fit audience” it hath, were not so “few,” and that the Damoclean sword suspended over it, did not continuously disturb the vision and paternal sympathies of its venerable father. The number before us begins the forth-eighth volume, and opens with a descriptive and scientific view of the present physical condition of Palestine; the geological features of the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, together with a theory of the manner of the destruction of the “cities of the plain,” whose sites are now said to be preserved in the briny waters of that lake.

The writer is John D. Sherwood, Esq., a young lawyer of this city, whose journeyings for three years (from 1840 to 1843) over nearly all Europe, down the Danube, in Turkey, Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt, the Desert, &c., with a traveller's enjoyment of adventure, the patient perseverance to secure it, and vigilant look-out upon social life and political institutions — have gathered a fund of varied incident, observations on character, living historic personages and scenes, that we hope to see some day, invented in a profitable capital. The present article is the fruit of some observations on the Holy Land, the breadth of whose “sacred acres” — “embracing an extent little larger than that covered by the counties that border on the Hudson from New York to Albany” — does, we confess, when thus brought [column 2:] subjecta oculis, in spite of our reminiscences of Continental States, across most of which one could drive while smoking a meershaum, a little surprise us. A dividing mountain ridge, about 3,000 feet high, shaggy with aromatic shrubs, separates the fertile western plain from the wasted and burnt hills that fill up the eastern half — hills a naked of men as of the means of subsisting them. Here lies the great crevasse of the Jordan River, sunk 1,400 feet below the Mediterranean, whose extreme southern forty miles are occupied by the Dead Sea; forming, with the scorched frame-work about it, the fit scenery-wreck of some great primeval tragedy. “The view,” says the writer, “from the northern shore down this lake, sunk between its precipitous walls, is one of appalling sublimity. There it lies, motionless and dark, with no voice, no pulse of life around or within it. No fish inhales its waters, no snail crawls along its shores, no trace of aught, human or animate, is anywhere to be seen.”

Mr. Sherwood regards the geological phenomena exhibited by the Sea, and its enclosing “grassless region,” as due to causes operating constantly, though with intermitted vigor, and that the catastrophe of the doomed cities was effected by ordinary agencies, miraculous only in time, and in their effects.

We have not space to speak, as we intended to do, of some other articles in this number.