The salt which is dug out of the earth, and that which is excavated out of isolated salt-mountains, are alike in every respect, and are much more probably the result of volcanic explosion than of the deposition of salt from sea-water, accruing from evaporation while pent up in confined spaces. It may have been, though incalculable ages ago, deposited from the sea, and then in course of time forced up while in a state of fusion by some internal disruption. We thus see that the six conditions under which we find the chloride of sodium more or less indicate a common origin from sea-water, notwithstanding the absence of marine organisms. If we take salt as a whole, leaving out of the question altogether the different conditions in which it is found, and with no reference at all to its existing either in the earth, above the earth, in lakes, or in the sea, but looking at it simply as it is, a mass of rock, or a volume of water holding it in solution, it inclines one to the belief that it possesses a dual inchoation, though the original source of both may have been connate; but owing to extraneous causes which were brought to bear, one branch became crystallised rock-salt, while the other, through immaturity, remains in a state of solution. One is rock-salt, which has been heaved up by volcanic power, and the other is what is known as sea-water; the former has produced the mines, and the solitary mountains, and the Indian Salt Range, and that salt which generates mineral waters, and, it may be, those saline lakes like that which exists between Bombay and Nagpur. According to Sir Charles Lyell, sea-water has access to volcanic foci. He says: “Although the theory which assumes that water plays a principal part in volcanic operations does not necessarily imply the proximity of volcanic vents to the ocean, it seems still to follow naturally that the superficial outbursts of steam and lava will be most prevalent where there is an incumbent body of salt water, or any regions rather than in the interior of a continent, where the quantity of rain-water is reduced to a minimum. The experiments of the most eminent chemists have gradually removed, one after another, the objections which were first offered to the doctrine that the salt water of the sea plays a leading part in most volcanic eruptions. Sir Humphry Davy observed that the fumes which escaped from Vesuvian lava deposited common salt.”