Although it will carry us a little out of our regular and stated course, to notice the other travels of this enterprising man in the place, yet we prefer doing it, in order that our readers, by having at once before them a brief abstract of all he performed for geography, may the better be enabled to appreciate his merits.

Soon after his second return to Cairo, he resolved to penetrate into Arabia, and to visit Mecca and Medina.  In order to secure his own safety, and at the same time gain such information as could alone be obtained in the character of a Mahomedan, he assumed the dress, and he was enabled to personate the religion, manners, and language of the native Hadje, or pilgrims.  Thus secure and privileged, he resided between four and five months in Mecca.  Here he gained some authentic and curious information respecting the rise, history, and tenets of the Wahabees, a Mahomedan sect.  These travels have not yet been published.

The last excursion of Mr. Burckhardt was from Cairo to Mount Sinai and the eastern head of the Red Sea.  This journey was published in 1822, along with the travels in Syria and the Holy Land; the latter of which he accomplished while he was preparing himself at Aleppo for his proposed journey into the interior of Africa.  These travels, therefore, are prior in date to those in Nubia, though they were published afterwards.

He spent nearly three, years in Syria:  his most important geographical discoveries in this country relate to the nature of the district between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Elana; the extent, conformation, and detailed topography of the Haouran; the situation of Apanea on the river Orontes, which was one of the most important cities of Syria under the Macedonian Greeks; the site of Petreea; and the general structure of the peninsula of Mount Sinai.  Perhaps the most original and important of these illustrations of ancient geography is that which relates to the Elanitic Gulph:  its extent and form were previously so little known, that it was either entirely omitted, or very erroneously laid down in maps.  From what he observed here, there is good reason to believe that the Jordan once discharged itself into the Red Sea; thus confirming the truth of that convulsion mentioned and described in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis, which interrupted the coarse of this river; converted the plain in which Sodom and Gomorrah stood into a lake, and changed the valley to the southward of this district into a sandy desert.

But Mr. Burckhardt, considering all these excursions, and their consequent numerous and important accessions to geographical knowledge, as only preludes to the grand expedition for which he had expressly come to the East, still looked forward to the interior of Africa.  This, however, he was not destined to reach; for while at Cairo, waiting for a caravan, which was to proceed by Mourzouck,—­a. route which he had long decided on as the most likely to answer his purpose,—­he was suddenly seized with a dysentery, on the 5th of October, 1817, and died on the 15th.