becoming acquainted with the savor of salt.[43] This carries back the traditional discovery of salt to the age when blood was first forbidden as food.

It was long ago claimed by some that the red corpuscles of the blood are dependent for their color and vitality on the presence of salt, and recent scientific experiments and discussion have continued in the direction of the question thus raised.[44]

It has been shown by experiment that many of the lower animals, as well as man, are dependent for their life on salt in their blood. "When an animal is fed with a diet as far as possible free from salts, but otherwise sufficient, it dies of salts-hunger. The blood first loses inorganic material, then the organs. The total loss is very small in proportion to the quantity still retained in the body; but it is sufficient to cause the death of a pigeon in three weeks, and of a dog in six, with marked symptoms of muscular and nervous weakness."[45] A mode of torture in former ages is said to have been to deprive a person of salt, and cause him to waste away with painful salt-hunger. It is said that this mode of torture is still employed in China.

An Armenian story says that when a band of their people was in a stronghold of the mountains, and was besieged by the Turks, the latter failing to subdue the former by other means cut off the supply of salt from the Armenians, and this quickly subdued them.

In 1830, a paper by Dr. W. Stevens, read before the London College of Physicians, and afterwards elaborated and published in a volume, contended that the salient ingredients of the blood, "the chief of which is common culinary salt, ... is the cause of the red color, of the fluidity, and of the stimulating property, of the vital current." Dr. Stevens claimed that the poison of the rattlesnake, and various other poisons, operate directly on the blood, and produce disease or death "by interfering with the agency of the saline matter."[46]

"On the subject of the poison of the rattlesnake," Dr. Stevens, in this work, asserts that "when the muriate of soda (common salt) is immediately applied to the wound, it is a complete antidote. 'When an Indian,' he says, 'is bitten by a snake, he applies a ligature above the part, and scarifies the wound to the very bottom; he then stuffs it with common salt, and after this it soon heals, without producing any effect on the general system.'" In view of the fact that it might be objected that the salt is not the essential means of cure, but is an addition to the curative treatment, Dr. Stevens says that he has "seen a rabbit, that was under the influence of the rattlesnake poison, drink a saturated solution of muriate of soda with great avidity, and soon recover; while healthy rabbits would not taste one drop of the same strong saline water when it was put before them."

Dr. Stevens gives various illustrations, out of primitive customs, and in the experience of modern practitioners, of curative and prophylactic uses of salt in the treatment of fevers, where the condition of the blood seems to be a main source of evil. Aside from the question whether the claims of Dr. Stevens have been substantiated by later researches and experiments, his investigations and assertions are of interest as showing that, in the realm of modern science as of primitive practices, salt and blood have seemed to many to have interchangeable values.

If, indeed, this theory of Dr. Stevens, elaborated so carefully in the first third of the nineteenth century, in which he claims that salt practically represents blood, stood all by itself in the history of medicine, it would have less importance than it has in a formal treatise of this kind; yet even then it would show that such an idea had before now found a place in the human mind. But it by no means stands thus alone; a similar claim has been made both earlier and later.

Pliny, in his day, at the beginning of the Christian era, records it as the common belief that salt is foremost among human remedies for disease, and among preventives of sickness of all kinds.[47] He gives prominence to salt as a cure of leprosy,[48] whereas blood transfusion and blood bathing was the traditional treatment of that disorder.[49] Pliny also speaks of salt itself, and of salt fish in large quantities, as a supposed remedy for the bite of serpents,[50] this being in the line of asserted remedies among the Indians, according to Dr. Stevens. Various other disorders, especially of the blood, are named by Pliny as curable by salt.

Seventy years after the treatise of Dr. Stevens, a volume, recently published in London by C. Godfrey Gümpel on "Common Salt,"[51] claims even more than Pliny, or any writer since his day, for "the vital importance of common salt for our whole physical and social life." He claims that of all the constituents of our life's blood "there is none which can possibly surpass common salt in its necessity for a strong healthy blood,"[52] and that both the red corpuscles and the white are largely dependent for their normal condition on "the presence of common salt in the system."[53]

A writer in the Asiatic Quarterly Review, not long ago declared that the government salt monopoly of the British Empire in India (since practically abolished, or modified) was a cause of greater evils than those resulting from either opium or alcohol. This claim is based on the idea that a lack of salt by the common people of India tends to a deterioration of blood and consequent loss of life. Asiatic cholera is said to be promoted by the lack of salt in the blood. Men and cattle alike are said to be sufferers from this cause, and the soil is rendered less fertile. Whether this idea is well