280 FOSSIL FOOD 



depends entirely upon the area of the original sea or 

 salt-lake, and the length of time during which the evapora- 

 tion went on. Sometimes we may get a mere film of salt ; 

 sometimes a solid bed six hundred feet thick. Perfectly 

 pure rock-salt is colourless and transparent ; but one 

 doesn't often find it pure. Alas for a degenerate world ! 

 even in its original site, Nature herself has taken the 

 trouble to adulterate it beforehand. (If she hadn't done 

 so, one may be perfectly sure that commercial enterprise 

 would have proved equal to the occasion in the long run.) 

 But the adulteration hasn't spoilt the beauty of the salt ; 

 on the contrary, it serves, like rouge, to give a fine fresh 

 colour where none existed. When iron is the chief colouring 

 matter, rock-salt assumes a beautiful clear red tint ; in 

 other cases it is emerald green or pale blue. As a rule, 

 salt is prepared from it for table by a regular process ; but 

 it has become a fad of late with a few people to put crystals 

 of native rock-salt on their tables ; and they decidedly look 

 very pretty, and have a certain distinctive flavour of their 

 own that is not unpleasant. 



Our English salt supply is chiefly derived from the 

 Cheshire and Worcestershire salt-regions, which are of tri- 

 assic age. Many of the places at which the salt is mined 

 have names ending in wich, such as Northwich, Middlewich, 

 Nantwich, Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich. This 

 termination wich is itself curiously significant, as Canon 

 Isaac Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection 

 between salt and the sea. The earliest known way of pro- 

 ducing salt was of course in shallow pans on the sea- shore, 

 at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and Early 

 English a wick or wich ; and the material so produced is 

 still known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people 

 came to discover the inland brine-pits and salt mines, they 

 transferred to them the familiar name, a wich ; and the 



