Salt, being existent in all animal and vegetable life, is coeval with life itself; it was present in the first herbage which gave nourishment to the first beast that, in its turn, became food for the first omnivorous man. In the beginning, man consumed the saline essences that were required to preserve his body in health, in the form of sodium chloride, which he absorbed in the uncooked flesh of animals, birds, and fishes, and in raw green-foods. The herbivorous animals were equally dependent upon salt, and, finding it in only infinitesimal quantities in the grasses upon which they fed, instinct directed them to the sea swamp pasturage and to the outcropping salt deposits. So long as man’s diet consisted of uncooked foods, his fresh meat provided him with a sufficiency of salt, but directly he employed a cook-pot in the preparation of his food, the boiling processes denuded it of 70 per cent. of its natural salt, and it became necessary for him to make up the deficiency. It must have been at this period that his herds directed his attention to the “salt licks” from which they satisfied their own saline wants, and enabled him to secure salt as a distinct and separate condiment. It is probable that, from the Palaeolithic Age down to the time of the early Roman writers, man was content to season his victuals by the simple process of licking a piece of rock-salt, and we have no record to indicate the period when salt was first employed in the cooking of food. From varieties of grain and fragments of pottery that have been discovered in the dwellings of the cave-men of Belgium, it is supposed that salt was employed in the cooking of wheat and barley some five thousand years ago. Thirteen centuries before Christ, fish preserved in salt was eaten in Ancient Troy, and, according to Herodotus, the Egyptians not only salted ducks, quails, and a species of sardine which inhabited the Nile, but also employed salt or brine as an antiseptic in preparing the bodies of the illustrious dead for the process of embalming.