It may be that this natural craving for salt, which is common to man and beast, may have suggested a custom of etiquette in Abyssinia. For when a native of that country desires to pay an especially delicate attention to a friend or guest, he produces a piece of rock-salt, and graciously permits the latter to lick it with his tongue; a custom not a whit more ridiculous than the ceremonious offering of snuff and the social sneeze of modern civilization. In certain portions of the Dark Continent salt is esteemed a great luxury, and is relished by native children quite as keenly as candy in more favored lands. In the region of Accra, on the coast of Guinea, salt is said to rank next to gold in value; and according to Mungo Park, among the Mandingos and Bambarras, west African tribes, whose members are unusually intelligent, the phrase, “flavoring one’s food with salt,” implies the possession of wealth.[328] The Namaquas, inhabitants of the Hottentot country, share so little the sentiments of their neighbors regarding salt that they consider it a superfluous article having no value whatever. About the year 1830 there appeared in England a volume by a certain Doctor Howard, with the following curious title: “Salt, the forbidden fruit or food; and the chief cause of diseases of the body and mind of man and of animals, as taught by the ancient Egyptian priests and wise men and by scripture, in accordance with the author’s experience of many years.”[329] As may well be imagined from its title, this book treats of salt as a most obnoxious substance, abstinence from which as an article of diet is essential to the maintenance of health. The use of salt as an article of food was, moreover, thought to render one irascible and melancholic, and in illustration of this view may be quoted the following passage from “Euphues and his England,” by John Lyly, Maister of Arte (1580):— In sooth, gentlemen, I seldome eate salte for feare of anger, and if you give me in token that I want wit, then will you make cholericke before I eate it; for women, be they never so foolish, would ever be thought wise. I staied not long for mine answer, but as well quickened by her former talke as desirous to cry quittance for her present tongue, said thus: “If to eat store of _salt_, cause one to fret; and to have no _salt_, signifies lack of wit, then do you cause me to marvel, that eating no _salt_, you are so captious; and loving no _salt_, you are so wise, when indeed so much wit is sufficient for a woman, as when she is in the raine can warne her to come out of it.”[330]