are pumping from an excellent “brine run” which is pumped without the damage to property and subsidence of land that have occurred in other parts of the Cheshire salt districts. The chronicle of the salt industry of Winsford is one of the romances of commerce. Until the river Weaver was made navigable, the Winsford salt manufacture was limited to the output of only four pans of unrecorded dimensions, which were probably worked by Middlewich makers. In 1758, the first year in which the Winsford shippings were recorded separately, the export of white salt was 1,055 tons. By the end of the century, Winsford sent 44,384 tons down the river Weaver, and, in the year 1850, their shipments had increased to 324,249 tons. This output had risen in 1880 to 794,824 tons of white salt. In the ensuing ten years there was a slight increase, followed by a sharp decline (in 1890) to 501,548 tons, or a fall from the high-water mark of 834,306 tons in 1881, of no less than 332,758 tons. The decline in the Winsford make of salt was not arrested by the formation of the Salt Union in 1888, and ten years later the output of white salt had decreased to 403,455 tons, and the export of rock-salt from Winsford, which had recommenced with an output of 141 tons in 1856 and risen to 28,236 tons in 1886, ceased in 1898. CHAPTER IV DEVELOPMENT OF BRINE PROCESSES It has been said that _De Re Metallica_ of Georgius Agricola, published in 1556, was regarded as the standard text-book on the subject for nearly two centuries, and in that long period the method he describes of salt-making by the artificial evaporation of brine underwent no material change. But from the last half of the seventeenth century, various attempts were made to effect improvements in the open-pan process in this country, and the history of these endeavours is set forth in a sequence of interesting publications. Among the most important of these is an article, which was printed in the _Philosophical Transactions_ of the Royal Society of England, in 1669, in which Dr. William Jackson, in the form of a catechism, gives a number of particulars concerning the salt springs of Nantwich and the ways of salt-making as practised in that town. It appears from this account that each of the salt houses was still furnished with six leads, but one learns that this number of leads had, in the case of the majority of the salt-houses, been converted into four iron-pans, rather more than 3 ft. square by about 6 in. deep, and containing the same quantity of brine as was previously distributed among the six leads; while still more recently the four pans had been again changed into two larger pans, and some salt-makers had re-fashioned these two receptacles into one great pan. The description which Dr. Jackson gives of the process is so concise and lucid that it may be reproduced here without the alteration of a word. The question that he propounds to himself is--