The Arkansaw traveler., 1885-10-10
The Origin of Salt. IRxchanreI

This world was once a haze of fluiC
 light, as the poets and the men of science
 agree in informing us. As soon as it be
 gan to cool down little the heavier ma
 terials naturally sank toward the center
 while the lighter, now represented by the
 ocean and the atmosphere, hoated in 2
 gaseous condition on the outside. Bu
 the great envelope of vapor thus pro
 duced did not consist merely of the con. stiIuentS of air and water many other
 gases and vapors mingled with them, as they still do to far less extent in ~ul existing atmosphere. By and by, as the cooling and condensiDg process con. tinued, th@water settled down from the condition of steam into one of liquid al dull red heat. As it condensed 1t car ried down with it A great many other substances, held in solution, whose com. ponent elements had previously existed Tn the primitive gaseous atm osphere.
 Thus the early ocean which covered the whole earth was in all 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 miscellaneous bodies. Moreover, It was not only just as salt as at the pres ent day, but even great deal salter. For from that time to thls, evaporation has constantly been going on Tn 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, of course, been Corres- pondingly purified. The same thing has likewise eappened in slightly different way with lime and flint, which have been separated from the water chiefly by living animals, and afterward deposited on the bottom of the ocean in immense layers as limestone, chalk, sandstone and clay
 Thus It turns out that in the end all our sources of salt supply are alike ulti- mately derived from the briny ocean. Whether we dig 1t out as solid rock salt from the open quarries of the Punab or, pump 1t up .tom brine wells sunk into the triasslc rocks of Cheshire, or evapo- rate 1t direct in the salt pans of England and the shallow salines of the Mediteran- mean shore, it is still at bottom essentially sea salt However distant the connection may seem, our salt is always ip 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 congregate, and the noble hunter turks in the thicket to mur- der then. unperceived, derive their salt ness, as an able Canadian geologist has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still retained among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose preciptates form the earliest known life bearing rocks. To the Homeric Greek, as to MT. Dick Swiv- eller, the ocean was always the briny to modern science, on the other hand, (which neither of those worthies would probably have appreciated at its own val uation.) ) the briny is always oceanic. The fossil food which we find to-day on all our dinner tables dates back it's origin primarily to the first seas that ever GOV cred the surface of our planet, and sec- ondarily to the great rock deposits of the dried-up triasslc inland sea. And yet even our men of science habitually de- scribe that ancient mineral as common salt.