aration 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, i