s; 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 primaeval 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 mate