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Ceratites nodosus, Schloth. Muschelkalk, Germany. The next member of the Trias in Germany, the Muschelkalk, which underlies the Keuper before described, consists chiefly of a compact greyish limestone, but includes beds of dolomite in many places, together with gypsum and rock-salt. This limestone, a formation wholly unrepresented in England, abounds in fossil shells, as the name implies.
We were on a distant part of the run, where my father had come to deposit salt. He had left home early in the dewy morning, carrying me in front of him on a little brown pillow which my mother had made for the purpose. We had put the lumps of rock-salt in the troughs on the other side of the creek.
It would appear that the saltness occurs in the greatest body of water where no current was perceptible, and as this was excessive when the river was first discovered, it may be attributed to saline springs, due to beds of rock-salt in the sandstone or clay. The bed of the river is on an average about sixty feet below the common surface of the country.
Now, even as they came down out of Furnace Creek Cañon into this trap, they began their efforts to escape from it. The Bennett party crossed the sink through the forest of rock-salt pinnacles and headed southward along a strip of loose sand which lay between the mud flat and the mountains. They believed the range might yet show a rift at this end which their wagons could traverse.
For in February, 1885, Professor Langley succeeded, after many fruitless attempts, in getting measures of a "lunar heat-spectrum." The incredible delicacy of the operation may be judged of from the statement that the sum-total of the thermal energy dispersed by his rock-salt prisms was insufficient to raise a thermometer fully exposed to it one-thousandth of a degree Centigrade!
The treasures of Africa were conveyed over the Peninsula to Gerrha or Katif, in the province of Bahrein, a city built, as it is said, of rock-salt, by the Chaldæan exiles; and from thence with the native pearls of the Persian Gulf, they were floated on rafts to the mouth of the Euphrates.
This kind is better than that which is made in the artificial pools though neither of them is equal to the salt of the mines. They are both known in commerce under the name of "bay-salt," to distinguish them from the "rock-salt" of the mines.
But Worcestershire and Cheshire were the seat of the inland sea when it had contracted to the dimensions of a mere salt lake, and begun to throw down its dissolved saline materials. One of the Cheshire beds is sometimes a hundred feet thick of almost pure and crystalline rock-salt.
Through some of these ran the aqueduct which brought the fresh water in, and another which conveyed the salt water out, twenty miles away. We were in the bosom of a mountain of salt rock, which is constantly forming, and is therefore a never-ending source of wealth. For centuries this mine has been worked. The salt rock is quarried and carried out in the form of rock-salt.
Here it ran snakily and, carved by broad-tired wheels and beaten out by slowly plodding hoofs in a soil more than half sand, glimmered white as rock-salt where the drifting leaves had left it naked. Once in this semi-dusk made luminous by sunlight which touched and quivered upon dead leaf and withered bush and bare brown bough like splashes of molten gold, the young man moved more sedately.
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