“This work is performed in two hours in the smaller pans, which are shallower, and generally boil their brine more away: wherefore their salt will last better, though it does not granulate so well, because when the brine is wasted, the fire and stirring breaks the cornes. But this salt weighs heavier and melts not so soon: and therefore is bought for many sales to a distance. But in the greater pans, which are usually deeper, they are above half an hour longer in boiling; but because they take their salt out of their brine, and only harden it in their hothouse, it is apter to melt away in a moist air: yet of this sort of salt the longer the grain is, the longer it endures: and generally this is the better granulated and the clearer, though the other be the whiter. And I think it is rather the taking of the salt out of the brine before it is wasted, that causes the granulating of it, than the ale, to which the workmen impute it. “They never cover their pans at all, during the whole time of boiling. They have their houses like barns open up to the thatch with a cover-hole or two to vent the steam of the pans.” [Illustration: THE GREAT CANAL-BURST AND LANDSLIP, OWING TO SUBSIDENCE NEAR NORTHWICH, 21ST JULY, 1907] On the subject of the supply and quality of the brine obtained at Nantwich and Middlewich, Dr. Jackson explains that the springs are rich or poor in a double sense, as a spring may be rich in salt but poor in the quantity of brine it affords. Thus, the chief pit at Middlewich contained a rich brine yielding a full fourth part of salt, but the supply was so meagre that the inhabitants were “limited to their proportions out of it,” and their requirements were made up out of pits furnishing a weaker brine. The pit at Nantwich was so plentiful as to supply all the salters, but while the brine contained only a sixth part of salt, “such quick use of it extremely strengthens the brine, perhaps to a degree little less than that of Middlewich pit.” In support of this statement that freshly drawn brine is richer than the liquor that has stood for some days in the pit, Dr. Jackson testified, as the result of personal experiment, that “a quart of brine, when the pit has been drawn off three or four days first, to supply five or six wich-houses, has yielded an ounce and a half more of salt than at another time, when it has had a rest of a week or thereabouts.”