The Cass County Republican. [volume] (Dowagiac, Mich.) 18??-1880, 1859-05-12
NUMBER 3.


ssThe Salt, if you PIease.'' 4
Everybody has partiality for din
ner, and one of the most frequent ex-
pressions at dinner table is the one
which forms our caption, and in order
hat our readers may know something
OF The substance they are using, we
will tesl them few facts about. salt.
Salt is q chemical compound of twenty
three parts, by weight, of beautiful
silver white, bst soft metal, called so-
dunn, discovered by Sir A. Davy in
1907, and thirty five parts of pungent.
yellow greenish gas, called chlorine
discovered by Scheele in 774-thess
two combined form this, themost wide
ly diffused and useful of any one com
pound in the world. 1t is found in tie {
sea, andsin the rocks, from which our
principal supplies come. The most
wonderful deposits are in Poland and
Hungary, where it is quarried like a
rock; one of the polish mines having
been worked since 1851. These polish
salt mines have heard the groans ,0e
many poor captive, and have the last
agonies of many brave man, for until
lately they have been worked entirely
by the state prisoners of Austria, Rus
sia or Poland, whichever happened 10
to be in power at the time; and onco
the offender, or fancied hindrance 70
some other persons advancement, was
let down into this subterranean prison,
he never saw the light of day again.
So salt has its history as well as its
science. Other large deposits are
found in Cheshire, England, where the
water is forced down in pipes into the
salt, and is pumped up again as brine,
whichis evapolated and the salt OBJ
tanned. To such an extent has thin,
been carried, that one town in the {" salt
country" as it is called, has scarcely an
upright house in it, all the foundations
having sunk with the ground, to fill up
the cavity left by the extracted soil.
| In Virginia there are beds of silt,
and the Salmon Mountains, in Oregon,
are capable of afording large quanti-
ties of the same material. The brine
springs of Salina and Syracuse are
well known, and from about forty
gallons of their brine, one bushels 6f
salt is obtained. There are also extern,
sive salt springs in Ohio. The brine
is pumped up from wells made in the
rock, and into which it flows and runs
into boilers. These boilers are large
iron kettles set in brickwork, and when
fires are lighted under them, the brine
is quickly evaperated. The moment
the brine begins to boil, it becomes
turpid from the compounds Of lime it
contains, and which are soluble in cold,
but not in hot water; these first sedi-
ments are taken out with ladies called.
&C bittern ladies'" and the salt being
next disposed of from the brine, is car
ried away to drain and dry. The re-
naming liquid contains great quanti-
ty of magnesia in every form.
"But how did this salt get into the
rock ?" is the natural query, and the
wonder seems greater when we rec
olect that salt beds are found in nearly
every one of the strata composing the
earth's crust. This fact proves anoth-
er that as majority of these salt beds
have come from the lakes left in the
hollows of the rocks by the recedence
of the sea, the sea has through all ge-
illogical ages been us salt as it is to-
day. Let us take Great Salt Lake as
an illustration, it being the largest salt
: lake in the world, but by no means the
only one, as such inland masses of sa-
line water are found all over the earth,
but as ours is the greatest in extent, it
will be the best example. 1t is situated
! 1920 feet above the level of the sea,
on the Rocky Mountains, and has an
cara of 2 1000 square miles; yet, as high
as it is, "once upon time," as the
story book of our juvenility used to
say,it was part of the sea, which re-
, tired with the upheaval of the rocks,
and that great basin took its salt water
up with it. Should this in time cvap-
crate, and its salt be covered with mud
and sand, and the land again be de-
/ pressed-then, at some distant future
age, the people would be wondering
: how the salt got there, little thinking
J that the Mormons ever built city upon
, its shores when it was a great salt lake.
There are also, however, salt rocks,
taxing ther place III regular geoiOSlcal
; series with other rocks, interspersed
between red sandstone, magnetism and
, carboniferous srata; these we can only
t account for, as we do for other STRATA
e fed rocks, viz: that they were deposit
. ed from their solution in water or car
ried mechanically to the spot where
: now found by that noble liquid. We
]. fear we shall be accused of an attempt
to put our readers in pickle, SO will stay
$ our pen, hoping they will remember
! these bits of information when next
they say, "The salt, if you please."-
, Scientific American.