116 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
the people should- make revolutions only to deliver themselves 
from the tax on salt. But I mhst have my taxes, the government 
may reply. I must get money somewhere to oil the machine, and 
have wherewith to build my fortifications and fatten my bankers. 
You are most reasonable, O government ! but tax your subjects 
proportionally to their fortunes, and not proportionally to their 
consumption of salt, which is directly as their poverty. 
If you must absolutely collect a tax of sixty millions on salt ; 
if you cannot otherwise keep enough standing armies, or fatten 
your bankers, why then re-establish the capitation tax. That 
will be more just. We are thirty-five millions of citizens, make 
us pay proportionally to our fortune, a tax whose average will be 
two francs per head, afterward emancipating the sale and fabrica- 
tion of salt. 
Salt is riches, purity ; salt has so sacred a character, that in all 
the primitive religions men found no more noble offering to present 
to the Deity. 
Jesus Christ said to his disciples : Ye are the salt of the earth.’’ 
Hospitality is symbolized by salt. The Arab considers himself 
bound to defend and protect the stranger whom he has admitted 
to share salt with him. Salt is the product most esteemed by 
people far from the sea, and the provision which soonest grows 
dear in a besieged city. 
The Patagonian and Tahitian, remarkable for their large frames, 
do their cooking with sea water. I have heard conscientious and 
enlightened physiologists assert this coincidence, that the generation 
of ’ 92 , which displayed such great physical and passional energy, 
was also that which had consumed most salt. The gabelle, under 
Louis the Fifteenth and Sixteenth, levying on every tax payer a 
fixed sum, whether he chose to consume the prescribed quantity 
of salt or not ; the people w^ere in a manner obliged to consume 
it, and hence those wonderful campaigns which our forefathers ex- 
ecuted with ease, and which appear to us pigmies, who economise 
salt, like works of giants. 
Seek now among the ramks of that invincible generation, what 
populations have given birth to the greatest number of the heroes 
and warriors who melted least under the sun of Egypt, and who 
