286 FOSSIL FOOD 



aea-salt. However distant the connection may seem, our 

 salt is always in the last resort obtained from the material 

 held in solution in some ancient or modern sea. Even the 

 saline springs of Canada and the Northern States of 

 America, where the wapiti love to congregate, and the 

 noble hunter lurks in the thicket to murder them unper- 

 ceived, derive their saltness, as an able Canadian geologist 

 has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still retained 

 among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose pre- 

 cipitates form the earliest known life-bearing rocks. To 

 the Homeric Greek, as to Mr. Dick Swiveller, the ocean 

 was always the briny : to modern science, on the other 

 hand (which neither of those worthies would probably have 

 appreciated at its own valuation), the briny is always the 

 oceanic. The fossil food which we find to-day on all 

 our dinner-tables dates back its origin primarily to the 

 first seas that ever covered the surface of our planet, and 

 secondarily to the great rock deposits of the dried-up 

 triassic inland sea. And yet even our men of science 

 habitually describe that ancient mineral as common salt. 



