Taylor. — Preservation of Fish by Salt 121 



just salting fish, and "that's all there is to it." It may be ad- 

 mitted readily that science has not so pervaded and dominated 

 the fish pickling industry as it has other ancient arts, but it 

 has contributed something, and is capable of contributing a 

 great deal more, and here lies the purpose of this paper. That 

 purpose is to present the rationale of salting and pickling fish 

 so that the reasons for the various steps and modifications 

 will be readily understood and appreciated, to the end that the 

 art may be practiced more intelligently and successfully. It 

 is a further purpose of this paper by showing what the few 

 attempts made by science have done for the art, to convince 

 and persuade those on whom the industry depends for its 

 existence and progress, that science can be expected to do a 

 great deal more than it ever has done if it is energetically 

 studied and applied. 



HOW SALT PRESERVES 



Salt preserves by extracting water. Spoiling is a series 

 of chemical activities for which water is necessary ; remove the 

 water and spoiling is arrested. The removal of water by 

 means of salt is in some senses a truer dehydration than 

 actual drying in air, for changes of an undesirable sort take 

 place in air drying that are never corrected, while salting may 

 be done in such a way that few changes other than removal 

 of water are brought about. The statement that salt pre- 

 serves by extracting water is to be taken strictly and literally, 

 for salt has no peculiar preserving or antiseptic quality, as 

 many people seem to think. Things live, die and putrefy in 

 the sea, which is one-fifth saturated with salt. But by suffi- 

 cient concentration, salt, an otherwise almost inert, harmless 

 substance becomes a powerful preservative, merely because, if 

 concentrated sufficiently it extracts water. The process of 

 transferring water from one place to another, as from the 

 inside of a fish to the outside, under the influence of con- 

 centrated solutions, is known to physicists and chemists as 



