16. Fossil Food

There is something at first sight rather ridiculous in the idea of
eating a fossil. To be sure, when the frozen mammoths of Siberia were
first discovered, though they had been dead for at least 80,000 years
(according to Dr. Croll's minimum reckoning for the end of the great ice
age), and might therefore naturally have begun to get a little musty,
they had nevertheless been kept so fresh, like a sort of prehistoric
Australian mutton, in their vast natural refrigerators, that the wolves
and bears greedily devoured the precious relics for which the
naturalists of Europe would have been ready gladly to pay the highest
market price of best beefsteak. Those carnivorous vandals gnawed off the
skin and flesh with the utmost appreciation, and left nothing but the
tusks and bones to adorn the galleries of the new Natural History Museum
at South Kensington. But then wolves and bears, especially in Siberia,
are not exactly fastidious about the nature of their meat diet.
Furthermore, some of the bones of extinct animals found beneath the
stalagmitic floor of caves, in England and elsewhere, presumably of
about the same age as the Siberian mammoths, still contain enough animal
matter to produce a good strong stock for antediluvian broth, which has
been scientifically described by a high authority as pre-Adamite jelly.
The congress of naturalists at Tübingen a few years since had a smoking
tureen of this cave-bone soup placed upon the dinner-table at their
hotel one evening, and pronounced it with geological enthusiasm
'scarcely inferior to prime ox-tail.' But men of science, too, are
accustomed to trying unsavoury experiments, which would go sadly against
the grain with less philosophic and more squeamish palates. They think
nothing of tasting a caterpillar that birds will not touch, in order to
discover whether it owes its immunity from attack to some nauseous,
bitter, or pungent flavouring; and they even advise you calmly to
discriminate between two closely similar species of snails by trying
which of them when chewed has a delicate _soupçon_ of oniony aroma. So
that naturalists in this matter, as the children say, don't count: their
universal thirst for knowledge will prompt them to drink anything, down
even to _consommé_ of quaternary cave-bear.

There is one form of fossil food, however, which appears constantly upon
all our tables at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every day, and which is
so perfectly familiar to every one of us that we almost forget entirely
its immensely remote geological origin. The salt in our salt-cellars is
a fossil product, laid down ages ago in some primæval Dead Sea or
Caspian, and derived in all probability (through the medium of the
grocer) from the triassic rocks of