SALT. 253 



in Boone County, Kentucky. Professor Shaler in his history of the 

 state says : 



Not only do we find the bones of animals which occupied the country when 

 the whites first came to it — the buffalo, the elk, the deer, etc. — but also deeper 

 in the mire, or in portions that indicate a greater antiquity, great quantities of 

 the bones of the fossil elephant, his lesser kinsman the mastodon, the musk-ox, 

 an extinct long-legged buffalo, the caribou or American reindeer, and various 

 other creatures which dwelt here in the time when the last glacial period covered 

 the more northern regions with a mantle of ice. 



"6* 



The number of animals buried in the swampy soil about this lick is 

 enormous. Many of them, in their eagerness to get at the brine, 

 rushed beyond their depth, and before they were aware of it were borne 

 down by their own weight until they were unable to extricate them- 

 selves, and so died of starvation. Others were probably pushed for- 

 ward by those that crowded on from behind and trodden into the soft 

 earth, where they died of suffocation. The locality was equally fatal 

 to small and to large animals. How many years or cycles ago this 

 destruction began we have no means of knowing, but that it continued 

 to comparatively recent times is extremely probable. 



Let us now examine some evidence which goes to show that man has 

 lived without salt. Sallust in his 'History of the Jugurthine War' 

 says the Numidians live chiefly on milk and the flesh of wild animals, 

 and that they use no salt or other relishes. Not only is the time to 

 which the historian refers comparatively recent, but he has the reputa- 

 tion of carefully verifying his facts. His statements, therefore, carry 

 great weight. It is held, moreover, that the Finnish name for salt 

 is derived from an Indo-European root. If this view is correct the 

 inference is natural and legitimate that the Finns did not know this 

 commodity until they came in contact with Aryans, probably Slavs, 

 from whom they got both the name and the thing, or rather the thing 

 and the name by which they heard it called. In the Odyssey the re- 

 nowned seer, Teiresias, directs Ulysses to travel until he comes to 'men 

 who know not the sea neither eat meat flavored with salt.' Pliny 

 supposes the Epirotes to be meant by this passage. But the point of 

 chief interest is that to the Homeric Greeks a saltless people were sup- 

 posed to live somewhere in the interior and in the most primitive con- 

 dition. The poet, instead of naming a dozen points of difference, with 

 epic prolixity, in life and usage between his own nation and this far- 

 off tribe, has selected a single characteristic as sufficiently explicit for 

 his purpose. Tacitus relates that toward the close of the first christian 

 century a great battle was fought between the Hermanduri and the 

 Chatti for the possession of a river boundary, a salt-producing stream, 

 because both parties believed that at this place heaven was especially 

 near and that nowhere else could they address their prayers to the gods 



