The History of Salt

4

According to C. Velleius Paterculus of Rome, Homer flourished B.C. 968; according to Herodotus, B.C. 884; the Arundelian Marbles fix his era B.C. 907.

5

To show how acute the Greek mind must have been, and how alive the philosophers of that classic country were to everything, whether beautiful or useful, we need only call to mind the quaint observation of Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, who was born about B.C. 300, and who says that “a soul was given to the hog instead of salt, to prevent his body from rotting;” by this we see he was quite cognisant of the preservative properties of salt.

6

Between the Nile and the Red Sea there are quarries of white marble, of porphyry, of basalt, and the beautiful green breccia, known as Verde d’Egitto; in the same locality are found gold, iron, lead, emerald, and copper.

7

A learned author states as follows: “We have seen, too, that the earliest state of Egypt, as seen in the pyramids, and in the tombs of the same age, reveals an orderly society and civilisation, of which the origin is unknown.”

8

No doubt they were proud of their African parentage, and looked upon the hoary monarchy of the Nile with a sentiment of religious awe and unfeigned wonder. Baron Bünsen graphically puts it: “Egypt was to the Greeks a sphinx with an intellectual human countenance.”

9

Probably owing to the existence of salt in Western Thibet and in Lahore, a province of Hindostan, also the Indian Salt Range, which stretches in a sigmoid curve, according to the late researches of Mr. Wynne, from Kalabagh on the Indus to a point north of Tank, both the Chinese and Hindoos may have been equally cognisant of its virtues with the Egyptians, especially when we have it recorded that the Celestials procured it by a process not only original but in a certain degree characteristic of Asiatic combination of ingenuity and clumsiness.

10

Baron Bünsen says that “No nation of the earth has shown so much zeal and ingenuity, so much method and regularity in recording the details of private life, as the Egyptians.” They were also most expert engineers; the canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, which may be called the canal of Rameses II., being protected at the Suez mouth by a system of hydraulic appliances to obviate difficulties arising from the variable levels of the water.

11

“It is a strange fact that the early Egyptians, like the Hindoos, had a religious dread of the sea,”(?); and yet in the reign of Necho, the son of Psammetichus, they actually accomplished the circumnavigation of Africa: the voyage took three years.

12

Dr. Draper’s “History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.”

13

“One momentous consequence of the Shepherd conquest appears to have been that the expelled Shemites carried back with them into Syria the arts and letters of Egypt, which were thence diffused by the maritime Phœnicians over the opposite shores of Greece. Thus Egypt began at this epoch to come in contact at once with the East and the West, with Asia and with Europe.”

14

“Euterpe,” book ii. chap. lxxvii.

15

Lord Bacon mentions somewhere in his works that the ancients discovered that salt water will dissolve salt put into it in less time than fresh water. The same great philosopher also affirms that “salt water passing through earth through ten vessels, one within another, hath not lost its saltness; but drained through twenty, becomes fresh.”

16

The Russians have a custom of presenting bread and salt to the newly-married bride and bridegroom. In archæology we have salt-silver, one penny at the feast of St. Martin, given by the tenants of some manors, as a commutation for the service of carrying their lord’s salt from market to his larder; an old English custom.

17

According to the researches of the late Mr. George Smith, Babylonian literature is of a much more ancient date than the histories of the Bible; which fact would tend to indicate that the intellectual development of that Eastern monarchy may have been coëval with that of the African.

18

Dr. Draper’s “History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.”

19

Leviticus ii. 13.

20

2 Kings ii. 21.

21

Judges ix. 45.

22

2 Chronicles xiii. 5.

23

Numbers xviii. 19.

24

Ezekiel xvi. 4.

25

Job v. 6.

26

St. Mark ix. 50.

27

Ibid.

28

Huxley’s “Physiography.”