FOSSIL FOOD 273 



sundry stages of mammoth and mastodon, of sabre-toothed 

 lion and huge rliinoceros. Man himself has progressed 

 gradually from the humble condition of a * hairy arboreal 

 (juadruped ' — these bad words are Mr. Darwin's own — to 

 the glorious elevation of an erect, two-handed creature, with 

 a county suffrage question and an intelligent interest in the 

 latest proceedings of the central divorce court. And after 

 all those manifold changes, compared to which the entire 

 period of English history, from the landing of Julius Cfrsar 

 to the appearance of tliis present volume (to take two im- 

 portant landmarks), is as one hour to a human lifetime, 

 we quietly dig up the salt to-day from that dry lake bottom 

 and proceed to eat it with the eggs laid by the hens this 

 morning for this morning's breakfast, just as though the 

 one food-stuff were not a whit more ancient or more dignified 

 in nature than the other. Why, mammoth steak is really 

 quite modern and common-place by the side of the salt in 

 the salt-cellar that we treat so cavalierly every day of our 

 ephemeral existence. 



The way salt got originally deposited in these great 

 rock beds is very well illustrated for us by the way it is still 

 being deposited in the evaporating waters of many inland 

 seas. Every schoolboy knows of course (though some 

 persons who are no longer schoolboys may just possibly 

 have forgotten) that the Caspian is in reality only a little 

 bit of tiie Mediterranean, which has been cut off from the 

 main sea by the gradual elevation of the country between 

 them. For many ages the intermediate soil has been quite 

 literally rising in the world ; but to this day a continuous 

 chain of salt lakes and marshes runs between the Caspian 

 and the Black Sea, and does its best to keep alive the 

 memory of the time when they were both united in a 

 single basin. All along this intervening tract, once sea 

 but now dry land, banks of shells belonging to kinds still 



