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