284 FOSSIL FOOD 



upon his imagination, observed that when our prime fore- 

 father first came to consciousness he found himself ' sot up 

 agin a fence.' One of his hearers ventured sceptically to 

 ejaculate, ' Den whar dat fence come from, ministah ? ' The 

 outraged divine scratched his grey wool reflectively for a 

 moment, and replied, after a pause, with stern solemnity, 

 ' Tree more ob dem questions will undermine de whole 

 system ob teology.' 



However, we are not permitted humbly to imitate the 

 prudent reticence of the Indian philosophers. In these 

 days of evolution hypotheses, and nebular theories, and 

 kinetic energy, and all the rest of it, the question why the 

 sea is salt rises up irrepressible and imperatively demands 

 to get itself answered. There was a sapient inquirer, 

 recently deceased, who had a short way out of this diffi- 

 culty. He held that the sea was only salt because of aD 

 the salt rivers that run into it. Considering that the 

 salt rivers are themselves salted by passing through salt 

 regions, or being fed by saline springs, all of which derive 

 their saltness from deposits laid down long ago by eva- 

 poration from earlier seas or lake basins, this explanation 

 savours somewhat of circularity. It amounts in effect 

 to saying that the sea is salt because of the large amount 

 of saline matter which it holds in solution. Cheese is also 

 a caseous preparation of milk ; the duties of an archdeacon 

 are to perform archidiaconal functions ; and opium puts one 

 to sleep because it possesses a soporific virtue. 



Apart from such purely verbal explanations of the salt- 

 ness of the sea, however, one can only give some such 

 account of the way it came to be ' the briny ' as the 

 following : 



This world was once a haze of fluid light, as the poets 

 and the men of science agree in informing us. As soon as it 

 began to cool down a little, the heavier materials naturally 



