16. Fossil Food - Page 2

Cheshire or Worcestershire. Since
that thick bed of rock-salt was first precipitated upon the dry floor of
some old evaporated inland sea, the greater part of the geological
history known to the world at large has slowly unrolled itself through
incalculable ages. The dragons of the prime have begun and finished
their long (and Lord Tennyson says slimy) race. The fish-like saurians
and flying pterodactyls of the secondary period have come into existence
and gone out of it gracefully again. The whole family of birds has been
developed and diversified into its modern variety of eagles and titmice.
The beasts of the field have passed through sundry stages of mammoth
and mastodon, of sabre-toothed lion and huge rhinoceros. Man himself has
progressed gradually from the humble condition of a 'hairy arboreal
quadruped'--these bad words are Mr. Darwin's own--to the glorious
elevation of an erect, two-handed creature, with a county suffrage
question and an intelligent interest in the latest proceedings of the
central divorce court. And after all those manifold changes, compared to
which the entire period of English history, from the landing of Julius
Cæsar to the appearance of this present volume (to take two important
landmarks), is as one hour to a human lifetime, we quietly dig up the
salt to-day from that dry lake bottom and proceed to eat it with the
eggs laid by the hens this morning for this morning's breakfast, just as
though the one food-stuff were not a whit more ancient or more dignified
in nature than the other. Why, mammoth steak is really quite modern and
commonplace by the side of the salt in the salt-cellar that we treat so
cavalierly every day of our ephemeral existence.

The way salt got originally deposited in these great rock beds is very
well illustrated for us by the way it is still being deposited in the
evaporating waters of many inland seas. Every schoolboy knows of course
(though some persons who are no longer schoolboys may just possibly have
forgotten) that the Caspian is in reality only a little bit of the
Mediterranean, which has been cut off from the main sea by the gradual
elevation of the country between them. For many ages the intermediate
soil has been quite literally rising in the world; but to this day a
continuous chain of salt lakes and marshes runs between the Caspian and
the Black Sea, and does its best to keep alive the memory of the time
when they were both united in a single basin. All along this intervening
tract, once sea but now dry land, banks of shells belonging to kinds
still living in the Caspian and the Black Sea alike testify to the old
line of water communication. One fine morning (date unknown) the
intermediate belt began to rise up between them; the water was