The congress of naturalists at Tuebingen 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 _soupcon_ 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 _consomme_ 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 primaeval Dead Sea or
Caspian, and derived in all probability (through the medium of the
grocer) from the triassic rocks of 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.
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