272 FOSSIL FOOD 



dinner-table at their hotel one evening, and pronounced it 

 with geological enthusiasm ' scarcely inferior to prime ox- 

 tail.' But men of science, too, are accustomed to trying 

 unsavoury experiments, which would go sadly against the 

 grain with less philosophic and more squeamish palates. 

 They think nothing of tasting a caterpillar that birds will 

 not touch, in order "to discover whether it owes its im- 

 munity from attack to some nauseous, bitter, or pungent 

 flavouring ; and they even advise you calmly to discriminate 

 between two closely similar species of snails by trying which 

 of them when chewed has a delicate soupcon of oniony 

 aroma. So that naturalists in this matter, as the children 

 say, don't count : their universal thirst for knowledge will 

 prompt them to drink anything, down even to consomm& of 

 quaternary cave-bear. 



There is one form of fossil food, however, which appears 

 constantly upon all our tables at breakfast, lunch, and 

 dinner, every day, and which is so perfectly familiar to 

 every one of us that we almost forget entirely its immensely 

 remote geological origin. The salt in our salt-cellars is a 

 fossil product, laid down age ago in some primaeval Dead 

 Sea or Caspian, and derived in all probability (through the 

 medium of the grocer) from the triassic rocks of Cheshire 

 or Worcestershire. Since that thick bed of rock-salt was 

 first precipitated upon the dry floor of some old evaporated 

 inland sea, the greater part of the geological history known 

 to the world at large has slowly unrolled itself through in- 

 calculable ages. The dragons of the prime have begun 

 and finished their long (and Lord Tennyson says slimy) 

 race. The fish-like saurians and flying pterodactyls of the 

 secondary period have come into existence and gone out of 

 it gracefully again. The whole family of birds has been 

 developed and diversified into its modern variety of eagies 

 and titmice. The beasts of the field have passed through 



