Cheese
is also a caseous preparation of milk; the duties of an archdeacon are
to perform archidiaconal functions; and opium puts one to sleep because
it possesses a soporific virtue.
Apart from such purely verbal explanations of the saltness of the sea,
however, one can only give some such account of the way it came to be
'the briny' as the following:--
This world was once a haze of fluid light, as the poets and the men of
science agree in informing us. As soon as it began to cool down a
little, the heavier materials naturally sank towards the centre, while
the lighter, now represented by the ocean and the atmosphere, floated in
a gaseous condition on the outside. But the great envelope of vapour
thus produced did not consist merely of the constituents of air and
water; many other gases and vapours mingled with them, as they still do
to a far less extent in our existing atmosphere. By-and-by, as the
cooling and condensing process continued, the water settled down from
the condition of steam into one of a liquid at a dull red heat. As it
condensed, it carried down with it a great many other substances, held
in solution, whose component elements had previously existed in the
primitive gaseous atmosphere. Thus the early ocean which covered the
whole earth was in all probability not only very salt, but also quite
thick with other mineral matters close up to the point of saturation. It
was full of lime, and raw flint, and sulphates, and many other
miscellaneous bodies.
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