94 



NEW ENGLAND FAEMEK. 



Feb. 



and maidens, in most States, for the construction 

 of school-houses and the education of the chil- 

 dren of others, and in various ways compel each 

 member of society to contribute to the common 

 welfare. 



"THE SALT, IP YOU PJLEASE." 



Everybody has a partiality for dinner, and one 

 of 'the most frequent expressions at a dinner-table 

 is the one which forms our caption ; and in or- 

 der that our readers may know something of the 

 substance they are using, we v;ill tell them a few 

 facts about salt. Salt is a chemical compound of 

 twenty-three parts by weight of a beautifully sil- 

 ver white but soft metal, called sodium, discov- 

 ered by Sir H. Davy, in 1807, and thirty-five 

 parts of a pungent, yellowish green gas, called 

 chlorine, discovered by Scheele, in 1774 — these 

 two combined form this, the most widely diffused 

 and useful of any compound in the world. It is 

 found in the sea, and in the rocks, from which 

 our principal supply comes. The most wonder- 

 ful deposits are in Poland and Hungary, where 

 it is quarried like a rock, one of the Polish mines 

 having been worked since 1251. These Polish 

 salt mines have heard the groan of many a poor 

 captive, and have seen the last agonies of many 

 a brave man, for until lately, they M'ere worked 

 entirely by the State prisoners of Austria, Rus- 

 sia or Poland, whichever happened to be in pow- 

 er at the time ; and once the offender, or fancied 

 hindrance to some other person's advancement, 

 was let down into this subterranean prison, he 

 never saw the light of day again. So salt has 

 its history as well as science. Other large de- 

 posits 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 evap- 

 orated and the salt obtained. To such an extent 

 has this been carried that one town in the "salt 

 country," as it is called, has scarcely an upright 

 nouse in it, all the foundations having sunk M'ith 

 the ground, to fill up the cavity left by the extri- 

 cated salt. 



In Virginia there are beds of salt, and the 

 Salmon Mountains, in Oregon, are capable of af- 

 fording large quantities of the same material. 

 The brine springs of Salina and Syracuse are 

 well known, and from about forty gallons of their 

 brine, one bushel of salt is obtained. 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 turbid, from the com- 

 pounds of lime that it contains, and which are 

 soluble in cold, but not in hot water ; these first 

 sediments are taken out with ladles called "bit- 

 turn ladles," and the salt being next deposited 

 from the brine, is carried away to drain and dry. 

 The remaining liquid contains a great quantity 

 of magnesia in vai-ious 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 ?" 

 is the natural query, and the wonder seems great- 

 er when we recollect that salt-beds are found in 



nearly every one of the strata composing the 

 earth's crust. This fact proves another, that as 

 the majority of these salt-beds have come from 

 lakes left in the hollows of the rocks by the re- 

 cedence of the sea, the sea has through 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 greatest in extent, it will form the 

 best example. It is situated at an elevation of 

 4,200 feet above the sea, on the Rocky Moun- 

 tains, and has an area of 2,000 square miles ; 

 yet, high as it is, "once upon a time," as the story 

 books of our juvenality used to say, it was part of 

 the sea, which retired, by the upheaval of the 

 rocks, and that great basin took its salt water up 

 with it. Should this in time evaporate, and its 

 salt water become covered with mud and sand, 

 and the .and again be depressed, then, at some 

 distant future age, the people would be wonder- 

 ing how the salt got there, little thinking that 

 the Mormons had ever built a city on its shores 

 when it was a great salt lake. There are, also, 

 however, salt rocks taking their place in regular 

 geologic series with other rocks, interspersed be- 

 tween red sandstone, magnesian and carbonifer- 

 ous strata ; these we can only account for, as we 

 do for other stratified rocks, viz., that they were 

 deposited from their solution in water, or carried 

 mechanically to the spot where now foand hy 

 that ever mobile liquid. We fear we should be 

 accused of an attempt to put our readers in 

 pickle, so we will stay our pen, hoping they wilJ 

 remember these bits of information when next 

 they say, "The salt, if you please." — Scientific: 

 American. 



THE iJEW YORK BANK TELLEKS. 



There is nothing in bank history inore remark- 

 able than the unfiequent and comparatively tri- 

 fling loss by forged signatures. It would seem 

 almost miraculous to a spectator standing by the 

 counter of one of our active city banks, to wit- 

 ness the rapidity with which the Teller pays 

 checks (often at the rate of three in a minute,) 

 wliilst at the sam.e time he is subjected to per- 

 petual interruptions from within and without. 

 At the end of the day, he has paid from four to 

 six hundred checks, amounting to more than a 

 million of dollars — a large proportion to strang- 

 ers. In the fifty- three city banks, during the 

 same six hours, there have been paid from fifteen 

 to twenty thousand cheeks, covering thirty mil- 

 lions of dollars, and not one forged signature \ 

 The records of the Clearing House show that 

 the amount of payments for a year through that 

 channel has reached the prodigious aggregate of 

 seven thousand millions of dollars. Another 

 large amount, not represented in the exchanges, 

 is paid over the counters, making a grand total 

 of probably eight thousand millions in three hun- 

 dred days, and yet it is seldom that the commu- 

 nity is startled by an announcement that a forged 

 check of any importance has slipped through the 

 hands of the Paying Teller in our city banks ! 



It is doubtless to the terrors of the law, partly, 

 that banks are indebted for this fortunate immu- 

 nity. But these are operations mostly at a sin- 



