beneath; by some, as the precipitate of a deep sea overcharged with saline matter; by some, as a deposit of salt-water lakes cut off from the main sea, like the salt lagoons of the tropics, by surf-raised spits or bars, and then dried up by the heat of the sun. It seems fatal to the first theory, that the eras of Plutonic disturbance in this part of the kingdom are of a date anterior to the era of the Saliferous Sandstone. The Clent Hills belong to the latest period of trappean eruption traceable in the midland counties; and they were unquestionably thrown up, says Murchison, shortly after the close of the Carboniferous era,—many ages ere the Saliferous era began. Besides, what evidence have we derived from volcanoes, either recent or extinct, that rock-salt, in deposits so enormously huge, is a volcanic product? Volcanoes in the neighbourhood of the sea,—and there are but few very active ones that have not the sea for their neighbour,-deposit not unfrequently a crust of salt on the rocks and lavas that surround their craters; but we never hear of their throwing down vast saliferous beds, continuous for great distances, like those of the New Red Sandstone of England. And further, even were salt in such huge quantity an unequivocally volcanic production, how account for its position and arrangement here? How account for the occurrence of a volcanic product, spreading away in level beds and layers for nearly two hundred miles, in one of the least disturbed of the English formations, and forming no inconsiderable portion of its strata? As for the second theory, it seems exceedingly difficult to conceive how, in an open sea, subject, of course, like all open seas, to such equalizing influences as the ruffling of the winds and the deeper stirrings of the tides, any one tract of water should become so largely saturated as to throw down portions of its salt, when the surrounding tracts, less strongly impregnated, retained theirs. I have seen

a fish-curer's vat throwing down its salt when surcharged with the mineral, but never any one stronger patch of the brine doing so ere the general mixture around it had attained to the necessary degree of saturation. And the lagoon theory, though apparently more tenable than any of the others, seems scarce less enveloped in difficulty. The few inches, at most few feet, of salt which line the bottoms and sides of the lagoons of the tropics, are but poor representatives of deposits of salt like those of the Upper Old Red of Cheshire; and Geology, as has been already indicated, has its deposits huger still. Were one of the vast craters of the moon,-Tycho or Copernicus,to be filled with sea-water to the brim, and the fires of twenty Ætnas to be lighted up under it, we could scarce expect as the result a greater salt-making than that of Cordova or Cracow. A bed of salt a hundred feet in thickness would demand for its salt-pan a lagoon many hundred feet in depth; and lagoons many hundred feet in depth, in at least the present state of things, are never evaporated.*

* Dr Friedrich Parrot, the Russian traveller, gives a brief account, in his "Journey to Ararat" (1836), of the salt lakes that now mark the site of the inland sea which seems to have once occupied a large portion of the central basin of Asia. Their salt, however, though abundant and valuable regarded as an article of traffic and a source of revenue, would form, we find, but an inconsiderable geologic deposit,-a stratum scarce equal to the thinnest of the unworkable seams at Stoke Prior or Northwich. "At the western extremity of the expansion of the river Manech, on its northern shore," says the traveller, "are a number of salt lakes, the largest of which, there called Grusnoe Azore, is probably the same that is distinguished in our maps by the name of the new salt lake, and is five miles long and two-thirds of a mile wide. These lakes have the property, in common with others of the same kind, that during the hottest season of the year, which in these parts is from May to the end of August, the surface of the water becomes covered with a crust of salt nearly an inch thick, which is collected with shovels into boats, and piled away. This is managed by private individuals, who rent the privilege from the Government of the Don, on condition of paying a tenth of the produce. On this occasion I was much interested in being able to prove to my own satis

66

The salt-works at Droitwich were visited in the reign of Henry the Eighth by Leland the antiquary. He " asked a salter," he tells us," how many furnaces they had in all; and the salter numbered them to an eighteen score, saying, that every one paid yearly to the king six shillings and eightpence." Making salt,” the antiquary adds, “ is a notable destruction of wood,-six thousand loads of the young pole-wood, easily cloven, being used twelvemonthly; and the lack of wood is now perceivable in all places near the Wyche, on as far as Worcester." The Dudley coal-field seems to have been broached just in time to preserve to the midland districts their iron and salt trade. The complaint that the old forests were well-nigh gone was becoming general, when in 1662 a Dudley miner took out a patent for smelting his ironstone with coke instead of charcoal; and the iron trade of England has been on the increase ever since. And only a few years later, the salters of Droitwich became equally independent of the nearly exhausted forests, by lighting up their "eighteen score furnaces” with coal. The railways and canals of the country have since spread the rock-salt of the New Red Sandstone over the empire; and it is a curious fact, that some of our old established Scotch saltworks,—works so old that they were in existence for centuries before the Scotch salter had ceased to be a slave, -are now engaged in crystallizing, not sea-water, as formerly,

faction, that in such lakes it is nothing more than the rapid evaporation from the heat of the sun, and the consequent super-saturation of the water with salt, that effects the crystallization of the latter; for these lakes are so shallow, that the little boats in which the salt is gathered are generally trailing on the bottom, and leave a long furrow behind them on it; so that the lake is consequently to be regarded as a wide pan of enormous superficial extent, in which the brine can easily reach the degree of concentration required; while, on the other hand, if the summer prove cold or rainy, the superfluous water must necessarily militate against the crystallization of the salt, or even prevent it altogether."

but rock-salt, from the midland counties of England. I picked up, about a twelvemonth ago, on a cart-road in the neighbourhood of Prestonpans, a fragment of rock-salt, and then, a few yards nearer the town, a second fragment; and, curious to know where the mineral could have come from, in a district that has none of its own, I went direct to one of the more ancient salt-works of the place to inquire. But the large reservoir of salt water attached to the works for supplying the boilers, and which communicates by a pipe with the profounder depths of the sea beyond, of itself revealed the secret. There, against one of the corners, lay a red, half-molten pile of the rock-salt of Cheshire, while the enveloping sea-water,—of old the only source of the salt manufactured in the village,—constituted but a mere auxiliary source of supply, and a solvent.

CHAPTER XI.

Walk to the Clent Hills.-Incident in a Fruit Shop.-St Kenelm's Chapel.-Legend of St Kenelm.-Ancient Village of Clent; its Appearance and Character.-View from the Clent Hills.-Mr Thomas Moss.-Geologic Peculiarities of the Landscape; Illustration.-The Scotch Drift.— Boulders; these transported by the Agency of Ice Floes.-Evidence of the former Existence of a broad Ocean Channel.-The Geography of the Geologist.-Aspect of the Earth ever changing.-Geography of the Palæozoic Period; of the Secondary; of the Tertiary.-Ocean the great Agent of Change and Dilapidation.

LET us now return to Hales Owen, and thence pass on to the Clent Hills,-famous resorts, in those parts, of many a summer pic-nic party from the nearer villages, and of pale-faced artizans and over-laboured clerks, broken loose for a few happy days from the din and smoke of the more distant Birmingham. I was fortunate in a pleasant day,—rather of the warmest for walking along the low dusty roads, but sufficiently cool and breezy on the grassy slopes of the hills. A humble fruitshop stood temptingly open among the naileries in the outer skirts of Hales Owen, and I stepped in to purchase a few pears: a sixpenceworth would have been by no means an overstock in Scotland to one who had to travel several miles up-hill in a warm day; and so I asked for no less here. The fruitman began to fill a capacious oaken measure, much like what in Scotland we would term a meal lippy, and to pile up the fruit over it in a heap. "How much is that?" I asked.