THE RUMINANTS LOVE SALT. 
115 
ing tlie mountains which he has denuded in his necessity to des- 
troy. [So in the clearings of America, the march of the settler is 
announced by the desolation of vast tracts of country, trunks of 
noble trees, felled in piles, and wastefully consumed over ten times 
the space necessary for culture, while towns and cities, sweltering 
in hot latitudes, begin a century after to plant trees along their 
streets for shade. — Ta.] 
These destructive inclinations seem to be innate in the race ; the 
little civilizee, as he drops from the breast, already tries to break 
with his feeble hands the flowers and vases within his reach. 
Salt has been prodigally spread by God over the surface of the 
globe. Certain springs have been saturated with it, so that man 
should have no other trouble than to evapoi ate the waters and to 
gather the residuum. 
It is deposited in beds by the waves of the sea, so that the fish- 
erman has always at hand the means of preserving. the product of 
his fisheries, and of sending it to a distance. In the midst of con- 
tinents, salt effloresces at the surface of the soil, and inexhaustible 
masses of it are inclosed in the bowels of the earth. 
As the wealth of man was to consist chiefly in the number and 
beauty of his herds, which fertilize the earth by their labor and 
restore it in manure what the harvests take off; God endowed 
most of those animals which were first to connect themselves with 
man, with a strong appetite for salt. Salt is for the Ruminants 
an important condition of health, vigor, and succulence ; it pro- 
tects them from parasitical insects. The dry grasses of meadows 
near the sea, and saturated with salt, are preferred by cattle to 
the tenderest and juciest grasses of the interior. The finest sheep 
live on salt meadows. 
The French civilizee could not rest till he had dried up this nat- 
ural source of wealth and corrected the work of God by the 
imposition of taxes so enormous, that not only the sheep and the 
ox have been forced to renounce salt, but even man, to reduce his 
consumption of it to insuflicient proportions. The French people 
will hardly believe that the two and one third pounds of salt, for 
which it has had to pay fifty and sixty centimes, costs only nine 
tenths of a centime at the place it is prepared. I conceive how 
