d, 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 prep