Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1886 — THE ORIGIN OF SALT. [ARTICLE]

THE ORIGIN OF SALT.

All Our Sonroei of Supply Ultimately Derived from the Briny Ocean. From the Cornhill Magazine. This world was once a haze of fluid light, as the poets and the men of Bcienceragree in infornrihg ns. As soon as it began to cool down a little the Heavier materials naturally sank toward the center, while the lighter, now represented bj the ocean and the atmosphere, floated in a gaseous condition on the outside. 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 ptill do to a far less extent in our present atmosphere. By and by, as the cooling and condensing process continued, the water settled down from the condition of steam into one of a liquid at a dull red heat.. As it condensed it carried down with it a great many other substances, held in solution, whose component elements had previously existed in the primitive gaseous atmosphere. Thus the early ocean which covered the whole earth was in all probability not only very salt, but also very thick with other mineral matters close up to the point of saturation. It was full of lime and raV flint, and sulphates, and many other miscellaneous 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 been constantly 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 a slightly different way, with the lime and flint which have been separated from the water chiefly by living animals and afterwards 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 ultimately derived from the briny ocean. Whether we dig it out as solid rock salt from the open quarries of the Punjab or pump it up from brine wells sunk into the triassic rocks of Cheshire, or evaporate it direct in the salt-pans of England and the shallow salines of the Mediterranean shore, it is at bofctom easentiaUy-aea salt, However distant the connection may seem our salt is always in the lost 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 Americn, where the wapita love to congregate, and the noble hunter lurks in the thicket to murder the unperceived, derive their saltness, as an able Canada gentleman hafe shown, from the tltinly scattered salts still- retained among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose precipitates form the earliest known life-bearing rocks. To the Homerib Greek, as to Mr. Dick Swiveller, the ocean was always briny; to modern science, on the other hand (which neither of these worthies would probably have appreciated at its own valuation), the briny is always oceanic. Thqjfossil food which vwe find to-day upon all our dinnertables dates back its origin primarily to the first seas that ever covered the surface of our planet, and secondarily to the great rock deposits of the driedup triassic inland sea. And yet our men of science habitually describe that ancient mineral as common salt.