Transcriber’s Note Italics are indicated with _underscores_, boldface with =equals signs=, and superscripts with ^{text} or ^text. [Illustration: VIEW OF THE COMMERCIAL SALT COMPANY’S BRINE RESERVOIRS AT RODE HEATH, CHESHIRE, Showing the Brine being pumped up from a depth of 250 feet _Frontispiece_ ] PITMAN’S COMMON COMMODITIES AND INDUSTRIES SALT AND THE SALT INDUSTRY BY ALBERT F. CALVERT, F.C.S. AUTHOR OF “SALT IN CHESHIRE”; “THE SALT DEPOSITS OF THE WORLD”; ETC. LONDON SIR ISAAC PITMAN & SONS, LTD., 1 AMEN CORNER, E.C.4 BATH, MELBOURNE AND NEW YORK PRINTED BY SIR ISAAC PITMAN & SONS, LTD., LONDON, BATH, MELBOURNE AND NEW YORK PREFACE The fact that salt is almost universally distributed over the surface of the globe, and has been worked in a number of countries from time immemorial, will explain the impossibility, in the limited space at my disposal, to consider the mineral and its manufacture comprehensively as the staple of a world-industry. The salt deposits of China, India, Russia, Japan, and Austria would each require a volume of the size of this if the subject was to be even adequately represented. I have, therefore, dared to assume that the public will accept a book practically restricted to one phase of the matter, and allow me to concentrate upon our Cheshire salt district and its industry. Caesar’s _salinators_, who found the natives of Cheshire procuring brine from little natural springs in the neighbourhoods of Northwich and Nantwich, taught them to boil the brine and precipitate the salt crystals in open pans set over open fires, and in the following 1,700 years all the salt of Cheshire was manufactured by that process. With the discovery of rock salt in 1670, mining was introduced, and for another 200 years both rock salt and brine salt were produced. But from causes which I have described, the mines collapsed in rapid succession from about the middle of the nineteenth century, and fresh water breaking into the abandoned workings converted them into the brine reservoirs from which the salt-men have since obtained their inexhaustible supplies of brine.