Falling in Love

16. Fossil Food

There is something at first sight rather ridiculous in the idea of

eating a fossil. To be sure, when the frozen mammoths of Siberia were

first discovered, though they had been dead for at least 80,000 years

(according to Dr. Croll's minimum reckoning for the end of the great ice

age), and might therefore naturally have begun to get a little musty,

they had nevertheless been kept so fresh, like a sort of prehistoric

Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigerators, that the wolves

and bears greedily devoured the precious relics for which the

naturalists of Europe would have been ready gladly to pay the highest

market price of best beefsteak. Those carnivorous vandals gnawed off the

skin and flesh with the utmost appreciation, and left nothing but the

tusks and bones to adorn the galleries of the new Natural History Museum

at South Kensington. But then wolves and bears, especially in Siberia,

are not exactly fastidious about the nature of their meat diet.

Furthermore, some of the bones of extinct animals found beneath the

stalagmitic floor of caves, in England and elsewhere, presumably of

about the same age as the Siberian mammoths, still contain enough animal

matter to produce a good strong stock for antediluvian broth, which has

been scientifically described by a high authority as pre-Adamite jelly.

The congress of naturalists at T****** a few years since had a smoking

tureen of this cave-bone soup placed upon the dinner-table at their

hotel one evening, and pronounced it with geological enthusiasm

'scarcely inferior to prime ox-tail.' But men of science, too, are

accustomed to trying unsavoury experiments, which would go sadly against

the grain with less philosophic and more squeamish palates. They think

nothing of tasting a caterpillar that birds will not touch, in order to

discover whether it owes its immunity from attack to some nauseous,

bitter, or pungent flavouring; and they even advise you calmly to

discriminate between two closely similar species of snails by trying

which of them when chewed has a delicate _soup**_ of oniony aroma. So

that naturalists in this matter, as the children say, don't count: their

universal thirst for knowledge will prompt them to drink anything, down

even to _consomm* of quaternary cave-bear.

There is one form of fossil food, however, which appears constantly upon

all our tables at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day, and which is

so perfectly familiar to every one of us that we almost forget entirely

its immensely remote geological origin. The salt in our salt-cellars is

a fossil product, laid down ages ago in some prim*** Dead Sea or

Caspian, and derived in all probability (through the medium of the

grocer) from the triassic rocks of Cheshire or Worcestershire. Since

that thick bed of rock-salt was first precipitated upon the dry floor of

some old evaporated inland sea, the greater part of the geological

history known to the world at large has slowly unrolled itself through

incalculable ages. The dragons of the prime have begun and finished

their long (and Lord Tennyson says slimy) race. The fish-like saurians

and flying pterodactyls of the secondary period have come into existence

and gone out of it gracefully again. The whole family of birds has been

developed and diversified into its modern variety of eagles and titmice.

The beasts of the field have passed through sundry stages of mammoth

and mastodon, of sabre-toothed lion and huge rhinoceros. Man himself has

progressed gradually from the humble condition of a 'hairy arboreal

quadruped'--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

C*** to the appearance of this present volume (to take two important

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

commonplace 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 the

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 living in the Caspian and the Black Sea alike testify to the old

line of water communication. One fine morning (date unknown) the

intermediate belt began to rise up between them; the water was all

pushed off into the Caspian, but the shells remained to tell the tale

even unto this day.

Now, when a bit of the sea gets cut off in this way from the main ocean,

evaporation of its waters generally takes place rather faster than the

return supply of rain by rivers and lesser tributaries. In other words,

the inland sea or salt lake begins slowly to dry up. This is now just

happening in the Caspian, which is in fact a big pool in course of being

slowly evaporated. By-and-by a point is reached when the water can no

longer hold in solution the amount of salts of various sorts that it

originally contained. In the technical language of chemists and

physicists it begins to get supersaturated. Then the salts are thrown

down as a sediment at the bottom of the sea or lake, exactly as crust

formed on the bottom of a kettle. Gypsum is the first material to be so

thrown down, because it is less soluble than common salt, and therefore

sooner got rid of. It forms a thick bottom layer in the bed of all

evaporating inland seas; and as plaster of Paris it not only gives rise

finally to artistic monstrosities hawked about the streets for the

degradation of national taste, but also plays an important part in the

manufacture of bonbons, the destruction of the human digestion, and the

ultimate ruin of the dominant white European race. Only about a third of

the water in a salt lake need be evaporated before the gypsum begins to

be deposited in a solid layer over its whole bed; it is not till 93 per

cent. of the water has gone, and only 7 per cent. is left, that common

salt begins to be thrown down. When that point of intensity is reached,

the salt, too, falls as a sediment to the bottom, and there overlies the

gypsum deposit. Hence all the world over, wherever we come upon a bed

of rock salt, it almost invariably lies upon a floor of solid gypsum.

The Caspian, being still a very respectable modern sea, constantly

supplied with fresh water from the surrounding rivers, has not yet begun

by any means to deposit salt on its bottom from its whole mass; but the

shallow pools and long bays around its edge have crusts of beautiful

rose-coloured salt-crystals forming upon their sides; and as these

lesser basins gradually dry up, the sand, blown before the wind, slowly

drifts over them, so as to form miniature rock-salt beds on a very small

scale. Nevertheless, the young and vigorous Caspian only represents the

first stage in the process of evaporation of an inland sea. It is still

fresh enough to form the abode of fish and mollusks; and the

irrepressible young lady of the present generation is perhaps even aware

that it contains numbers of seals, being in fact the seat of one of the

most important and valuable seal-fisheries in the whole world. It may be

regarded as a typical example of a yet youthful and lively inland sea.

The Dead Sea, on the other hand, is an old and decrepit salt lake in a

very advanced state of evaporation. It lies several feet below the level

of the Mediterranean, just as the Caspian lies several feet below the

level of the Black Sea; and as in both cases the surface must once have

been continuous, it is clear that the water of either sheet must have

dried up to a very considerable extent. But, while the Caspian has

shrunk only to 85 feet below the Black Sea, the Dead Sea has shrunk to

the enormous depth of 1,292 feet below the Mediterranean. Every now and

then, some enterprising De Lesseps or other proposes to dig a canal from

the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, and so re-establish the old high

level. The effect of this very revolutionary proceeding would be to

flood the entire Jordan Valley, connect the Sea of Galilee with the Dead

Sea, and play the dickens generally with Scripture geography, to the

infinite delight of Sunday school classes. Now, when the Dead Sea first

began its independent career as a separate sheet of water on its own

account, it no doubt occupied the whole bed of this imaginary engineers'

lake--spreading, if not from Dan to Beersheba, at any rate from Dan to

Edom, or, in other words, along the whole Jordan Valley from the Sea of

Galilee and even the Waters of Merom to the southern desert. (I will not

insult the reader's intelligence and orthodoxy by suggesting that

perhaps he may not be precisely certain as to the exact position of the

Waters of Merom; but I will merely recommend him just to refresh his

memory by turning to his atlas, as this is an opportunity which may not

again occur.) The modern Dead Sea is the last shrunken relic of such a

considerable ancient lake. Its waters are now so very concentrated and

so very nasty that no fish or other self-respecting animal can consent

to live in them; and so buoyant that a man can't drown himself, even if

he tries, because the sea is saturated with salts of various sorts till

it has become a kind of soup or porridge, in which a swimmer floats,

will he nill he. Persons in the neighbourhood who wish to commit suicide

are therefore obliged to go elsewhere: much as in Tasmania, the

healthiest climate in the world, people who want to die are obliged to

run across for a week to Sydney or Melbourne.

The waters of the Dead Sea are thus in the condition of having already

deposited almost all their gypsum, as well as the greater part of the

salt they originally contained. They are, in fact, much like sea water

which has been boiled down till it has reached the state of a thick

salty liquid; and though most of the salt is now already deposited in a

deep layer on the bottom, enough still remains in solution to make the

Dead Sea infinitely salter than the general ocean. At the same time,

there are a good many other things in solution in sea water besides

gypsum and common salt; such as chloride of magnesia sulphate of

potassium, and other interesting substances with pretty chemical names,

well calculated to endear them at first sight to the sentimental

affections of the general public. These other by-contents of the water

are often still longer in getting deposited than common salt; and, owing

to their intermixture in a very concentrated form with the mother liquid

of the Dead Sea, the water of that evaporating lake is not only salt but

also slimy and fetid to the last degree, its taste being accurately

described as half brine, half rancid oil. Indeed, the salt has been so

far precipitated already that there is now five times as much chloride

of magnesium left in the water as there is common salt. By the way, it

is a lucky thing for us that these various soluble minerals are of such

constitution as to be thrown down separately at different stages of

concentration in the evaporating liquid; for, if it were otherwise, they

would all get deposited together, and we should find on all old salt

lake beds only a mixed layer of gypsum, salt, and other chlorides and

sulphates, absolutely useless for any practical human purpose. In that

case, we should be entirely dependent upon marine salt pans and

artificial processes for our entire salt supply. As it is, we find the

materials deposited one above another in regular layers; first, the

gypsum at the bottom; then the rock-salt; and last of all, on top, the

more soluble mineral constituents.

The Great Salt Lake of Utah, sacred to the memory of Brigham Young,

gives us an example of a modern saline sheet of very different origin,

since it is in fact not a branch of the sea at all, but a mere shrunken

remnant of a very large fresh-water lake system, like that of the

still-existing St. Lawrence chain. Once upon a time, American geologists

say, a huge sheet of water, for which they have even invented a

definite name, Lake Bonneville, occupied a far larger valley among the

outliers of the Rocky Mountains, measuring 300 miles in one direction by

180 miles in the other. Beside this primitive Superior lay a second

great sheet--an early Huron--(Lake Lahontan, the geologists call it)

almost as big, and equally of fresh water. By-and-by--the precise dates

are necessarily indefinite--some change in the rainfall, unregistered by

any contemporary 'New York Herald,' made the waters of these big lakes

shrink and evaporate. Lake Lahontan shrank away like Alice in

Wonderland, till there was absolutely nothing left of it; Lake

Bonneville shrank till it attained the diminished size of the existing

Great Salt Lake. Terrace after terrace, running in long parallel lines

on the sides of the Wahsatch Mountains around, mark the various levels

at which it rested for awhile on its gradual downward course. It is

still falling indeed; and the plain around is being gradually uncovered,

forming the white salt-encrusted shore with which all visitors to the

Mormon city are so familiar.

But why should the water have become briny? Why should the evaporation

of an old Superior produce at last a Great Salt Lake? Well, there is a

small quantity of salt in solution even in the freshest of lakes and

ponds, brought down to them by the streams or rivers; and, as the water

of the hypothetical Lake Bonneville slowly evaporated, the salt and

other mineral constituents remained behind. Thus the solution grew

constantly more and more concentrated, till at the present day it is

extremely saline. Professor Geikie (to whose works the present paper is

much indebted) found that he floated on the water in spite of himself;

and the under sides of the steps at the bathing-places are all encrusted

with short stalactites of salt, produced from the drip of the bathers as

they leave the water. The mineral constituents, however, differ

considerably in their proportions from those found in true salt lakes of

marine origin; and the point at which the salt is thrown down is still

far from having been reached. Great Salt Lake must simmer in the sun for

many centuries yet before the point arrives at which (as cooks say) it

begins to settle.

That is the way in which deposits of salt are being now produced on the

world's surface, in preparation for that man of the future who, as we

learn from a duly constituted authority, is to be hairless, toothless,

web-footed, and far too respectable ever to be funny. Man of the present

derives his existing salt-supply chiefly from beds of rock-salt

similarly laid down against his expected appearance some hundred

thousand *** or so ago. (An ** is a very convenient geological unit

indeed to reckon by; as nobody has any idea how long it is, they can't

carp at you for a matter of an ** or two one way or the other.)

Rock-salt is found in most parts of the world, in beds of very various

ages. The great Salt Range of the Punjaub is probably the earliest in

date of all salt deposits; it was laid down at the bottom of some very

ancient Asiatic Mediterranean, whose last shrunken remnant covered the

upper basin of the Indus and its tributaries during the Silurian age.

Europe had then hardly begun to be; and England was probably still

covered from end to end by the prim*** ocean. From this very primitive

salt deposit the greater part of India and Central Asia is still

supplied; and the Indian Government makes a pretty penny out of the dues

in the shape of the justly detested salt-tax--a tax especially odious

because it wrings the fraction of a farthing even from those unhappy

agricultural labourers who have never tasted ghee with their rice.

The thickness of the beds in each salt deposit of course depends

entirely upon the area of the original sea or salt-lake, and the length

of time during which the evaporation went on. Sometimes we may get a

mere film of salt; sometimes a solid bed six hundred feet thick.

Perfectly pure rock-salt is colourless and transparent; but one doesn't

often find it pure. Alas for a degenerate world! even in its original

site, Nature herself has taken the trouble to adulterate it beforehand.

(If she hadn't done so, one may be perfectly sure that commercial

enterprise would have proved equal to the occasion in the long run.) But

the adulteration hasn't spoilt the beauty of the salt; on the contrary,

it serves, like rouge, to give a fine fresh colour where none existed.

When iron is the chief colouring matter, rock-salt assumes a beautiful

clear red tint; in other cases it is emerald green or pale blue. As a

rule, salt is prepared from it for table by a regular process; but it

has become a fad of late with a few people to put crystals of native

rock-salt on their tables; and they decidedly look very pretty, and have

a certain distinctive flavour of their own that is not unpleasant.

Our English salt supply is chiefly derived from the Cheshire and

Worcestershire salt-regions, which are of triassic age. Many of the

places at which the salt is mined have names ending in _wich_, such as

Northwich, Middlewich, Nantwich, Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich.

This termination _wich_ is itself curiously significant, as Canon Isaac

Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea.

The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans

on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and

Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still

known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the

inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the familiar

name, a wich; and the places where the salt was manufactured came to be

known as wych-houses. Droitwich, for example, was originally such a

wich, where the droits or dues on salt were paid at the time when

William the Conqueror's commissioners drew up their great survey for

Domesday Book. But the good, easy-going medi*** people who gave these

quaint names to the inland wiches had probably no idea that they were

really and truly dried-up bays, and that the salt they mined from their

pits was genuine ancient bay-salt, the deposit of an old inland sea,

evaporated by slow degrees a countless number of ages since, exactly as

the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake are getting evaporated in our own

time.

Such, nevertheless, is actually the case. A good-sized Caspian used to

spread across the centre of England and north of Ireland in triassic

times, bounded here and there, as well as Dr. Hull can make out, by the

Welsh Mountains, the Cheviots, and the Donegal Hills, and with the Peak

of Derbyshire and the Isle of Man standing out as separate islands from

its blue expanse. (We will beg the question that the English seas were

then blue. They are certainly marked so in a very fine cerulean tint on

Dr. Hull's map of Triassic Britain.) Slowly, like most other inland

seas, this early British Caspian began to lose weight and to shrivel

away to ever smaller dimensions. In Devonshire, where it appears to have

first dried up, we get no salt, but only red marl, with here and there a

cubical cast, filling a hole once occupied by rock-salt, though the

percolation of the rain has long since melted out that very soluble

substance, and replaced it by a mere mould in the characteristic square

shape of salt crystals. But Worcestershire and Cheshire were the seat of

the inland sea when it had contracted to the dimensions of a mere salt

lake, and begun to throw down its dissolved saline materials. One of the

Cheshire beds is sometimes a hundred feet thick of almost pure and

crystalline rock-salt. The absence of fossils shows that animals must

have had as bad a time of it there as in the Dead Sea of our modern

Palestine. The Droitwich brine-pits have been known for many centuries,

since they were worked (and taxed) even before the Norman Conquest, as

were many other similar wells elsewhere. But the actual mining of

rock-salt as such in England dates back only as far as the reign of King

Charles II. of blessed memory, or more definitely to the very year in

which the 'Pilgrim's Progress' was conceived and written by John Bunyan.

During that particular summer, an enterprising person at Nantwich had

sunk a shaft for coal, which he failed to find; but on his way down he

came unexpectedly across the bed of rock-salt, then for the first time

discovered as a native mineral. Since that fortunate accident the beds

have been so energetically worked and the springs so energetically

pumped that some of the towns built on top of them have got undermined,

and now threaten from year to year, in the most literal sense, to cave

in. In fact, one or two subsidences of considerable extent have already

taken place, due in part no doubt to the dissolving action of rain

water, but in part also to the mode of working. The mines are approached

by a shaft; and, when you get down to the level of the old sea bottom,

you find yourself in a sort of artificial gallery, whose roof, with all

the world on top of it, is supported every here and there by massive

pillars about fifteen feet thick. Considering that the salt lies often a

hundred and fifty yards deep, and that these pillars have to bear the

weight of all that depth of solid rock, it is not surprising that

subsidences should sometimes occur in abandoned shafts, where the water

is allowed to collect, and slowly dissolve away the supporting columns.

Salt is a necessary article of food for animals, but in a far less

degree than is commonly supposed. Each of us eats on an average about

ten times as much salt as we actually require. In this respect popular

notions are as inexact as in the very similar case of the supply of

phosphorus. Because phosphorus is needful for brain action, people jump

forthwith to the absurd conclusion that fish and other foods rich in

phosphates ought to be specially good for students preparing for

examination, great thinkers, and literary men. Mark Twain indeed once

advised a poetical aspirant, who sent him a few verses for his critical

opinion, that fish was very feeding for the brains; he would recommend a

couple of young whales to begin upon. As a matter of fact, there is more

phosphorus in our daily bread than would have sufficed Shakespeare to

write 'Hamlet,' or Newton to discover the law of gravitation. It isn't

phosphorus that most of us need, but brains to burn it in. A man might

as well light a fire in a carriage, because coal makes an engine go, as

hope to mend the pace of his dull pate by eating fish for the sake of

the phosphates.

The question still remains, How did the salt originally get there? After

all, when we say that it was produced, as rock-salt, by evaporation of

the water in inland seas, we leave unanswered the main problem, How did

the brine in solution get into the sea at all in the first place? Well,

one might almost as well ask, How did anything come to be upon the earth

at any time, in any way? How did the sea itself get there? How did this

planet swim into existence at all? In the Indian mythology the world is

supported upon the back of an elephant, who is supported upon the back

of a tortoise; but what the tortoise in the last resort is supported

upon the Indian philosophers prudently say not. If we once begin thus

pushing back our inquiries into the genesis of the cosmos, we shall find

our search retreating step after step _ad infinitum_. The negro

preacher, describing the creation of Adam, and drawing slightly upon

his imagination, observed that when our prime forefather first came to

consciousness he found himself 'sot up agin a fence.' One of his hearers

ventured sceptically to ejaculate, 'Den whar dat fence come from,

ministah?' The outraged divine scratched his grey wool reflectively for

a moment, and replied, after a pause, with stern solemnity, 'Tree more

ob dem questions will undermine de whole system ob teology.'

However, we are not permitted humbly to imitate the prudent reticence of

the Indian philosophers. In these days of evolution hypotheses, and

nebular theories, and kinetic energy, and all the rest of it, the

question why the sea is salt rises up irrepressible and imperatively

demands to get itself answered. There was a sapient inquirer, recently

deceased, who had a short way out of this difficulty. He held that the

sea was only salt because of all the salt rivers that run into it.

Considering that the salt rivers are themselves salted by passing

through salt regions, or being fed by saline springs, all of which

derive their saltness from deposits laid down long ago by evaporation

from earlier seas or lake basins, this explanation savours somewhat of

circularity. It amounts in effect to saying that the sea is salt because

of the large amount of saline matter which it holds in solution. Cheese

is also a caseous preparation of milk; the duties of an archdeacon are

to perform archidiaconal functions; and opium puts one to sleep because

it possesses a soporific virtue.

Apart from such purely verbal explanations of the saltness of the sea,

however, one can only give some such account of the way it came to be

'the briny' as the following:--

This world was once a haze of fluid light, as the poets and the men of

science agree in informing us. As soon as it began to cool down a

little, the heavier materials naturally sank towards the centre, while

the lighter, now represented by the ocean and the atmosphere, floated in

a gaseous condition on the outside. But the great envelope of vapour

thus produced did not consist merely of the constituents of air and

water; many other gases and vapours mingled with them, as they still do

to a far less extent in our existing atmosphere. By-and-by, as the

cooling and condensing process continued, the water settled down from

the condition of steam into one of a liquid at a dull red heat. As it

condensed, it carried down with it a great many other substances, held

in solution, whose component elements had previously existed in the

primitive gaseous atmosphere. Thus the early ocean which covered the

whole earth was in all probability not only very salt, but also quite

thick with other mineral matters close up to the point of saturation. It

was full of lime, and raw flint, and sulphates, and many other

miscellaneous bodies. Moreover, it was not only just as salt as at the

present day, but even a great deal salter. For from that time to this

evaporation has constantly been going on in certain shallow isolated

areas, laying down great beds of gypsum and then of salt, which still

remain in the solid condition, while the water has, of course, been

correspondingly purified. The same thing has likewise happened in a

slightly different way with the lime and flint, which have been

separated from the water chiefly by living animals, and afterwards

deposited on the bottom of the ocean in immense layers as limestone,

chalk, sandstone, and clay.

Thus it turns out that in the end all our sources of salt-supply are

alike ultimately derived from the briny ocean. Whether we dig it out as

solid rock-salt from the open quarries of the Punjaub, or pump it up

from brine-wells sunk into the triassic rocks of Cheshire, or evaporate

it direct in the salt-pans of England and the shallow _salines_ of the

Mediterranean shore, it is still at bottom essentially sea-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 unperceived, 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 precipitates

form the earliest known life-bearing rocks. To the Homeric Greek, as to

Mr. d**k 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.