Mr. Ward admitted that the process was archaic, but he was at pains to demonstrate that the trade was justified in desiring it to remain so. He argued that the price of salt was so low, and the product was so bulky, that costly and elaborate apparatus was both inappropriate and ineffective. He compared the life of an ordinary open salt-pan with that of any of the innumerable patented pans that had been tried, and found that the ancient article produced salt at less cost than the patent contraptions, and was far easier to repair. “The chief business of the salt manufacturer,” Mr. Ward wrote in 1894, “is to utilize to the best purpose, for the production of salt, the heat obtained from the fuel. To this end, innumerable patents have been taken out, but few have been so successful as the simple application of direct heat to open pans. The method seems a very primitive one, and most visitors to salt-works think they can improve upon what they consider a rude, antiquated system. I have had brought before me, and have seen working, scores of patented plans. In all, or nearly all, the idea was to economize heat; and if the whole of salt manufacturing consisted in evaporating the greatest quantity of water with the least quantity of fuel, doubtless many of the schemes would succeed instead of fail, as they do now.” Since the open-pan system of manufacturing salt from brine was in general and uninterrupted use in this country from the time of Julius Caesar to within a few years ago, we must study the interim developments from direct-fire to vacuum pan evaporation in the industry of the State of New York. The salt springs in New York State were discovered by Jesuit missionaries about the middle of the seventeenth century, but the manufacture of salt on a commercial scale was not begun until 1788, when the industry was established in the vicinity of Syracuse. Solar salt is still manufactured in large quantities at Syracuse, where the evaporating surface covers an area of over 12,000,000 square feet, and the season’s output amounts to about 3,500,000 bushels of salt, but between the solar and the vacuum processes the American salt-men have exploited the Pan and the Kettle processes of direct-fire evaporation, and the Steam Kettle and the Grainger processes of steam evaporation; all of which methods are employed to-day in the State of New York.