Year: 1859

Everybody has partiality for dinner, and
one of the most frequent expressions at a din
Der table is the one which forms our caption,
and in order that onr readers may know some
thing of the substance they are using, we will
tell them few facts about salt. Salt is a che.
mcal compound of twenty three parts by wegt
of beautifully silver white, but soft metal,
called sodium, discovered by Sir H. Davy, in
1907, and thirty-fve parts of pungent, yel-
lowish green gas, called chlorine, discovered by
Scheele in l774-these two combined form
this, the most widely diffused and useful of any
one compound in the world. 1t is found in the
sea, and in the rocks from which onr principal
supply comes. The most wonderful deposits
are in Poland and Hungary, where it is quar-
ried Ike rock, one of the Polish mines having
been worked since 1851 These Polish salt
mines have heard the groan Of many a poor
captive, and have seen the last agonies of many
brave man, for until lately, they were work
ed entirely by the State Prisoners of Austria,
Russia, or Poland, whichever happened to be
in power at the time and once the offender,
or fancied hindrance to some other persons ad-
vancement, was let down into the Subterranean
prison. he never saw the light of day again.
So salt has its history as we'll as science
Other large deposits are found in Cheshire,
England, where the water is forced down by
pipes into the salt, and is again pumped up as
brine, which is evapOrated and the salt obtain
ed. To such an extent has this been carried,
that ore town in the salt county," 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 salt


In Virginia there are beds Of salt, and the
Salmon Mountains, in Oregon, are capable of
affording large quantities of the same material
The brine springs of Salina and Syracuse are
welknown, and from about forty gallons of
their brine one buShel of salt is obtaned-
There are also extensive 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 evaporated
The moment the brine begins to boil, it becomes
turpid, from the compounds of lime that it con-
tains, and which are soluble in cold, but not
in hot water these first sediments are taken
out with ladies called "bittern ladies'" and
the salt being next deposited from the brine,
is carried away to drain and dry. The remain
ing liquid contains great quantity of mag
nesia, in various forms, and gives it the name
of bittern, from the taste peculiar to mag
nesia in every form.


/" But how did this salt come into the rock p
is the natural query, and the wonder seems
greater when we recoect that salt beds are
found is nearly every one of the strata COM
posing the earth'S crust This fact proves
another that as the majority of these salt-beds
have come from lakes left in the hollows ofthe
rocks by the recedence of the sea the sea has
throu ugh all the geologic ages, been as salt as
it is to-day. Let US take the 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 saline water are found
over the whole earth, but as ours is the great
est in extent, it will form the best example,
is situated at an elevation of 1900 feet above
the sea, on the Rocky Mountains, and has an
area of 1000 square miles /; yet high as it is,
once upon a time," as the storybooks of our
juvenility used to say, it was part of the sea,
which retired, by the upheaval of the rocks,
and that basin took its salt water up with it.
Should this in time evaporate, and its salt be-
come covered with mud and sand, and the land
again be depressed then at some distant fu-
turc age, the people would be wondering how
the salt got tbore, little thinking that the Nor
mons had ever built city on its shores when
| it was great salt lake. There are also how
ever, salt rocks taking their place in regular
geologic series with other rocks. interspersed
between red sandstone, magnetism and carbon-
ferrous strata these we can only account Tor,
as We do for other stratifed rocks, viz: that
they we're deposited from their solution in water
or carried mechanically TO the spot where now