We generally think of hops when yeast is mentioned. I wish any of you who can tell us the story of hops would send it in to our Department.
Salt
How could we cook, or eat, or live without salt? It is an absolute necessity for people and animals. Also, it is very valuable as a fertilizer, and was used as such centuries and centuries ago by the Hindoos and Chinese. Further than this, soda is derived from salt, and as soda is necessary in making both glass and soap, these two useful things could not be made if it were not for salt. Most of our modern textile fabrics are more or less dependent on chlorine, which is made from salt. We all know how valuable salt is as a preservative for butter, meats and other animal food, and now they are learning a way to preserve timber with it. We know, too, its use in freezing ice cream, but may not realize how much it is used for refrigerating other things. In short, even if we could live at all without it, life would be pretty miserable.
The chemists call salt chloride of sodium and use this symbol for it—Na Cl, which shows what it is composed of, but doesn’t mean anything to me.
We get salt in three ways—from rock-salt mines, from natural brine springs and from evaporating sea water. The world’s biggest rock-salt mines are in Gallicia, upper Austria, Bavaria, Hungary, Transylvania, Wallachia; at Vic and Dienze, France; at Bix, Switzerland; at Cadrona, Spain, and at Cheshire, England. That at Wieliczka in Gallicia is a mile long, three-fourths of a mile wide and over a thousand feet deep. Some of its chambers are 150 feet high—as high as a sky-scraper—and one of them is fitted up as a chapel to St. Anthony, the altar, statues and everything being solid salt. In this mine is a lake 650 feet long and 40 feet deep. There are horses there that have never seen the light of day, and men, women and children who live in salt houses and never see the outside world above their heads. It is a small village buried down under the ground. When the emperor and his family visit the mine, it is brilliantly illuminated and a grand festival is held in a great hall.
In Africa are large beds of salt land, beds of rock-salt and a lake covered at times with a shining white crust of pure salt two feet thick. France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and some Mediterranean islands are the chief producers of sea-salt. In China there are salt wells of great depth and number.
In Spain, France and other countries salt is a government monopoly, and no one else can sell it. Travelers tell me they have seen salt lakes in Spain where the people living along the shores were prevented by the guardia civile, or national police, from picking up the salt deposited in large quantities at the water’s edge. They had to buy it of the government. The poor use salt sparingly over there even now, and you may remember that the heavy tax on salt was one cause of the awful French Revolution.
In our country nearly every state has salt deposits of some kind. Virginia furnishes lots of rock-salt. The most important salt springs are in Onondaga County, New York, and furnish nearly half of what the country uses. The state owns them and gets a royalty of one cent a bushel. Michigan produces about twenty million bushels a year.
