98 Extraction of Salts from Sea- Water. 



of its greatness and its wealth. The lagoons which surrounded 

 that city were enclosed, and set apart for the breeding of fish, 

 and for the manufacture of salt. Making a monopoly of this 

 staple of life, the policy of Venice was to obtain possession of all 

 those salines which could compete with her, and we find the 

 Venetians destroying such as they could not make use of, and ex 

 acting from the neighbouring princes, treaties to the effect that 

 they would not re-establish the suppressed salines. It was only 

 two or three centuries later that this powerful republic ordered, in 

 the interest of her commerce, the suppression of the salines of 

 her own lagoons, and augmented the produce of those of Istria 

 and of the Grecian Islands, which had become hers by right of 

 conquest, still retaining in her own hands the trade in salt for all 

 southern Europe. But with the downfall of Venitian power, we 

 find the salines of Provence and Languedoc growing into impor- 

 tance, while those of Venice had fallen into decay, so that when 

 the Emperor Napoleon I. created the kingdom of Italy, he had re- 

 course to a French engineer from Marseilles to re-establish the 

 salines of Venice, which are now once more organised on a vast 

 scale. 



It is however in France, and especially upon the shores of the 

 Mediterranean, that we shall find the most extensive salines, and 

 the most intelligent system of working these great sources of 

 -national wealth. On the western coast of France, the salt marshes 

 of Brittany and La Vendue are wrought to a considerable extent, 

 but the cool, moist and rainy climate of these regions is much less 

 favorable to this industry than that of the southern shores of the 

 empire, where dry and hot summers offer great facilities for the 

 evaporation of the sea-water, which is effected in all the salines of 

 which we have spoken, by the sun and wind, without artificial 

 heat. 



The salt-works of the lake of Berre, near Marseilles, were those 

 whose products attracted the most attention at the Exhibition, not 

 only on account of the excellent method there pursued for the 

 manufacture of sea-salt, but from the fact that the important pro- 

 cesses of Mr. Balard for the extraction of potash, sulphates and 

 other valuable materials from the mother liquors, are there ap- 

 plied on a large scale. Having had occasion to examine carefully 

 these products in the course of my duties as Juror at the Exhibi- 

 tion, and having afterwards visited the saline of Berre, I propose 

 to give here some account of its construction and mode of opera- 



