(We will beg the question that the English seas were
then blue. They are certainly marked so in a very fine cerulean tint on
Dr. Hull's map of Triassic Britain.) Slowly, like most other inland
seas, this early British Caspian began to lose weight and to shrivel
away to ever smaller dimensions. In Devonshire, where it appears to have
first dried up, we get no salt, but only red marl, with here and there a
cubical cast, filling a hole once occupied by rock-salt, though the
percolation of the rain has long since melted out that very soluble
substance, and replaced it by a mere mould in the characteristic square
shape of salt crystals. 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. The absence of fossils shows that animals must
have had as bad a time of it there as in the Dead Sea of our modern
Palestine. The Droitwich brine-pits have been known for many centuries,
since they were worked (and taxed) even before the Norman Conquest, as
were many other similar wells elsewhere. But the actual mining of
rock-salt as such in England dates back only as far as the reign of King
Charles II. of blessed memory, or more definitely to the very year in
which the 'Pilgrim's Progress' was conceived and written by John Bunyan.
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