And that vast salt bed, now a mine whose streets reach for miles under the town and country! By torchlight it glitters with reflected flame, surpassing in brilliancy all fairy land! There lies a dead sea, with salt enough to supply the world for ever.
Thirty or forty lofty chimneys are erected over it, and are, as new monuments, strangely marking the spot where a sea had laid buried for ages unknown.
This is in Prussian Saxony, whence came our invaders in the olden time. There is to be seen an old Saxon church in a village just outside the town; one descends into it by steps. A dust of ages, vagrant as the wind, but which loves to take shelter against walls, and to bury them as time goes on, has settled itself for the time to come. Churches exactly like this church are to be seen on the hills of Bath, with their Saxon tower. Inside it are the high pews and the gallery, at one end of which, on the right, near the pulpit, is the pew of the squire. It is old England before it migrated to our shores.
Thus our ancestors brought their institutions here; so we in turn take them with us to newer lands.
My son-in-law was Professor of Chemistry at the Westminster, in succession to the gifted Dr. Marcet, whose assistant he had been for some years. He resigned his place, and his brother Augustus Dupré was elected in his stead, while he went to Stassfurt to do chemistry on a larger scale, extricating tens of thousands of tons of potash from its chlorine. He was then the father of a baby, he has now two grown-up daughters and three grown-up sons.
I stayed several weeks at Stassfurt. My son Cecil was there under Dupré. He had been a student at the Westminster laboratory; he is now Chief Inspector of Explosives at Melbourne in Victoria.