Morning journal and courier., 1885-09-23
The Origin of Salt. M.


 This world was once haze of fluid light,
 as the poets and the men of science agree in
 informing us. As soon as it began to cool
 down little the heavier materials naturally
 sank toward the center, while the lighter,
 now represented by the ocean and the at
 mosphere, foated in a gaseous condition on
 the out side. But the great envelope of vapor thus produced did not consist merely of the constituents of the air and water; many other gases and vapors mingled with them, as they still do to far less extent in our existing atmosphere. By and by, as the cooling and condensing process continued, the water settled down from the condition of steam into one of liquid at a dull red heat. As it condensed it carried down with it a great many other substances, held in solu- tion whose component elements had pre- viously existed in the primitive gaseous at mosphere. Thus the early ocean which GOV cred the whole earth was in ali probability not only very salt, but also quite thick with | other mineral matters close up to the point of saturation. It was full of lime and raw | flint and sulphates and many other miscel- ! laneous bodies Moreover, it was not only just as salt as at the present day, but even a | great deal salter. For from that time to this evaporation has constantly been going on in certain shallow isolated areas, laying down great beds of gypsum and then of salt, which ! still remain in the solid condition, while the water has likewise happened in slightly ! different way with the lime and flint, which I have been separated from the water chiefly by living animals, and afterwards deposited on the bottom of the ocean in immense lay CTS as limestone, chalk, sandstone, and clay. Thus it turns out that in the end all our sources of salt supply are alike ultimately derived from the briny ocean. Whether we dig it out as solid rock salt from the open quarries of the Punjab, or pumped up from Cheshire, or evaporate it direct in the salt pans of England and the shallow salines of the Mediterranean shore, it is still at bot tom essentially sea salt. However distant the connection may seem, our salt is always in the last resort obtained from the material held in solution in some ancient or modern sea. Even the saline springs of Canada and the northern States of America, where the wapiti love to eongregate, and the noble hunter turks in the thicket to murder them unperceived, ,sderive their saltness, as an able Canadian geologist has shown, from the thin ly scattered salts still retained among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose precipitates form the earliest known life hearinp rocks To the Homeric Greek, as to
 MT. Dick Swiyeller, the ocean was always the
 briny: to modern science, on the other hand,
 (which neither of those worthies would prob
 ably have appreciated at it's own valuation,)
 the briny is always the oceanic The fossil
 food which we find to-day on all our dinner tables date back it's origin primarily to the first seas that ever covered the surface of our planet, and secondarilv to the great rock deposits of the dried-up triassic inland sea. And yet even our men of science habit ually describe that ancient mineral as com mon salt.