brine but also
as rock-salt, is an important object of industry in Cheshire, the
output from that county and Staffordshire exceeding a million tons
annually. In Worcestershire, Durham and Yorkshire salt is also
produced from brine.

The total number of persons in any way occupied in connexion with
mines and quarries in England and Wales in 1901 was 805,185; the
number being found to increase rapidly, as from 528,474 in 1881.
Coal-mines alone occupied 643,654, and to development in this
direction the total increase is chiefly due. The number of ironstone
and other mines decreased in the period noticed from 55,907 to 31,606.

_Manufacturing Industries._--There are of course a great number of
important industries which have a general distribution throughout the
country, being more or less fully developed here or there in accordance
with the requirements of each locality. But in specifying the principal
industries of any county, it is natural to consider those which have an
influence more than local on its prosperity. In England, then, two broad
classes of industry may be taken up for primary consideration--the
textile and the metal. Long after textile and other industries had been
flourishing in the leading states of the continent, in the Netherlands,
Flanders and France, England remained, as a whole, an agricultural and
pastoral country, content to export her riches in wool, and to import
them again, greatly enhanced in value, as clothing. It is not to be
understood that there were no manufacturing industries whatever. Rough
cloth, for example, was manufactured for home consumption. But from
Norman times the introduction of foreign artisans, capable of
establishing industries which should produce goods fit for distant sale,
occupied the attention of successive rulers. Thus the plantation of
Flemish weavers in East Anglia, especially at the towns of Worstead (to
which is attributed the derivation of the term worsted) and Norwich,
dates from the 12th century. The industry, changing locality, like many
others, in sympathy with the changes in modern conditions, has long been
practically extinct in this district. Then, when religious persecution
drove many of the industrial population of the west of Europe away from
the homes of their birth, they liberally repaid English hospitality by
establishing their own arts in the country, and teaching them to the
inhabitants. Thus religious liberty formed part of th