legality of a course of action which they had previously denounced and opposed as totally illegal, carried so much weight with the Select Committee, that they made an unsavoury meal of the Parliamentary decisions of 1766, 1833, 1861, 1890, 1891, and 1893, and announced that the Bill could not proceed. CHAPTER VII LATEST METHODS OF SALT-MAKING In tracing the development of the salt-making industry in this country, it will be observed that, until the last quarter of a century, the old open-pan system defied improvement, and the salt-makers from generation to generation successfully resisted the endeavours of all who suggested innovations or hinted that better methods could be introduced in the manufacture. It is true that experiments were made with the sizes and arrangement of the pans, that coal replaced wood and straw as fuel, that the locomotive superseded the wain as a means of transporting salt from the works to the markets, and that pumps were employed instead of buckets to raise the brine and deposit it in the cisterns which supplied the pans; but these several developments produced no change in the system of manufacture, which consisted of lighting a fire beneath a pan of brine, driving off the water in the form of vapour, and collecting the salt crystals that form and sink to the bottom of the pan. The salt-men were devoted to their primitive, rule-of-thumb methods, and the most enterprising among them regarded the process as unimprovable. In the construction of salt-works there was no attempt at engineering exactness; the size of the pans was regulated roughly by the dimensions of the plates of which they were made; and the heights of the brickwork of the furnaces, etc., was usually reckoned by courses of bricks. The fireman, the real salt-maker, whose business it was to attend to the fires and see that the proper degree of heat was maintained to produce the variety of salt required, did his work almost entirely by rule-of-thumb. It was only rarely that a thermometer was used. The technical knowledge acquired by experience enabled a man to see at a glance whether the pan was working properly, and the quantity and quality of the salt showed whether his work had been well or ill done. The late Thomas Ward was a greatly respected authority, one of the most reliable experts of the Salt Union, and a voluminous writer and indefatigable lecturer on every aspect of the subject of salt, but he failed to persuade himself that it was even thinkable that the open-pan system should ever be abandoned in favour of a more scientific, more rapid, or more economical process.