ancient Romans, was, in like manner, the great symbol of the union, that bound the members of a family to each other.

Scarcely less general is, however, the dread which salt inspired by its strange power of destroying the productiveness of the soil; and thus it became, very early, already the symbol of sterility also. Jeremiah cursed Judah, by condemning it "to inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt-land, and not inhabited;" and the terrible fate of Lot's wife has left the curse vivid in the memory of men. For the same reason, when Abimelech had destroyed the city of Sichem, and rased its walls to the ground, the place where it had stood was sown with salt, not in order to make it sterile, but as a sign that it should remain waste forever. Even the Middle Ages employed the dread symbol; and the great Barbarossa, after taking rebellious Milan, and destroying its beautiful buildings, ordered the plough to be passed over the city, and then salt to be strewn on the spot, leaving only the churches unharmed, "for the greater glory of God."

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On the other hand, salt makes savory things" palatable again, as Job already mentions; and hence it soon became usual to speak of it as a symbol of that sagacity which uses apparently worthless matters for a good purpose, and employs words of trifling import in themselves with great effect. was the first meaning of Attic salt; hence, also, St. Paul writes, "Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how to answer every man ;" and the Saviour Himself calls His disciples "the salt of the earth," as men by whose instruction and example their brethren are to be taught and saved from condemnation.

All this worship of salt as a divine gift, this veneration of its sacred character, and this dread of its destructive powers, centre, however, in the simple fact, taught by modern chemistry, that salt is the great regulator of the health of the world. Without it, the seas would be impure and the land a desolate scene VOL. II.-46

of destruction; man would not be able to live, and the beasts of the field, with the plants that feed them, would no longer be seen. The little grain of salt, at which we hardly glance, is thus of vital importance in the great household of nature. But it shares the fate of all indispensable things by which we are surrounded: habit makes dull the sensibility of our senses, and with it the activity of thought that depends on such impressions. Only what is rare and unusual attracts our attention, though it have but an outside brilliancy and useless beauty. The sparkling diamond is sure of admiration; set in bright gold, it is esteemed above all things, and serves to enhance beauty, to display our wealth, or to symbolize supreme power. The unattractive twinsister, black coal, has to do hard work in the kitchen, the workshop, and the factory, like a true Cinderella; and yet on coal, and not on the diamond, rests the true wealth of a nation, the foundation of happiness for countless millions. Thus it is with the tiny grain of salt; rich and poor see it, day by day, on their table, and enjoy it with every thing they eat and drink, but few ever inquire whence it came, and what accident or what necessity brought it there. And yet, let it be missing but for a single day, and how we would suffer!

We all know that the ocean is salt, and that without it neither animal nor plant could live in the vast basins of the earth. But it is less generally known that the amount of salt in different seas is not the same, but steadily decreases in the direction from the equator to the poles. Scoresby tells us that, of European seas, the Mediterranean holds most, the Baltic least; so that the fishermen of the north have to send for the salt they need in preserving their fish, to the more favored regions of the south, and salt becomes a patron of active trade. The Atlantic Ocean, again, has more salt than the Pacific, and the Polar Sea least of all. With the amount of salt, which makes the water denser, and thus better able to bear heavy ves

sels on its broad shoulders, changes, of course, also the degree of density; and as water is naturally desirous to restore the equilibrium, there follows a constant flow to and fro; so that salt here appears as the great motive-power, which causes the currents of the sea! These again, in their turn, bestow warmth on Western Europe, mix the differently heated waters of the ocean so as to protect the life that teems in them against cold, and favor the sailing of trade-ships. Thus climate and temperature, winds and currents, navigation and the fertility of coast-lands, all depend on the presence of the little pinch of salt!

Far better known is the fact that man, like all animal life, cannot exist without salt, but must miserably perish, so that among the most terrible punishments, entailing certain death with fearful suffering, that of feeding criminals with saltless food was not uncommon in barbarous times, and prevailed, to our disgrace, until quite recently, in one of the northern countries of Europe. Animals, deprived of salt, lose their hair, become lean and hideous to look at, and die a death of unspeakable suffering. The reason is simple. A man, weighing a hundred and fifty pounds, carries in him at least one pound of salt; it constitutes five per cent. of the solid matter of his blood, and an almost equal proportion of all the cartilages of the body, and the bile contains soda as a special and indispensable element in the process of digestion. If the salt, then, be withdrawn, or the ounce which every one of use daily loses, by perspiration and other means, be not replaced, digestion is arrested, the bony part of our frame is not rebuilt, the eye loses its brilliancy, and the whole system breaks down.

Hence the craving of man and beast alike for the precious grain. Pliny but expressed the necessity of its use for life, when he said that all the loveliness and joyousness of life could not be better expressed than by the name of salt, and the rulers of the world were not slow in taking advantage of this fact, by taxing the indispensable gift of na

ture. Five hundred years before Christ, already, the mythical king, Ancus Martius, established, at the mouth of the Tiber, a saline, under the control of the state; and at a later period the censor Livius earned the name of Salinator, by raising the duty on salt. From distant China to the west of Europe, every Government learned to treat salt as one of the regalia; and not many years ago, poor French peasants were still cruelly punished if they dared draw a bucket of water from the great ocean, in order to secure the few grains of salt it contained!

As vegetable food is both unpalatable and little nutritious unless accompanied by salt, herbivorous animals everywhere delight in its use. The wild buffalo and the deer, as well as our domestic cattle, enjoy it with evident relish; and the Alpine herdsman, like the Gaucho of the Pampas, trains his half-wild herds to meet him at certain places, by depositing small quantities of salt at regular intervals. When the eager huntsman, in Southern Africa, is in search of rare sport, he hides himself at a favorite salt-lick, and is sure to be amply rewarded; and the cunning chamois-hunter of the Alps prepares his way, years ahead, by cautiously placing a handful of salt in accessible spots, until even those sagacious animals are beguiled, by their greediness, and finally fall into the hands of their enemy.

Even here, however, man shows his strange superiority over lower beings; for while animals, without exception, love salt with equal fondness, the desire among men differs essentially. Nations who live largely on animal food, value it naturally less than those who prefer a vegetable diet. Thus Mungo Park speaks of certain tribes in Southwestern Africa, who never take salt by any chance, and adds that even Europeans, travelling in their country, never feel the want of it. The same disregard prevails in the colds of Siberia, where the peoples of whole districts eat their food without a particle of salt. On the other hand, there are Indian tribes, true vegetarians, who consume it in large

quantities, so that the children are seen sucking pieces of salt like sugar. In certain portions of Africa, he is deemed a rich man who can afford eating salt with his food; in the mountains of the South, small pieces of it circulate as money, and on the Gold Coast a handful of salt will purchase two serviceable slaves!

A nicer distinction, yet, is the wellestablished fact, that the active races require salt more imperatively than the passive races; and this, in connection with the refined instincts of the body, explains, no doubt, the startling difference between the Gaucho of South America, who hardly knows what salt is, and the intelligent son of European

races, who could not live a fortnight without his accustomed supply.

How wonderful, then, that the presence of a "pinch of salt," a thing of no value and hardly noticed by millions of us, should be the condition of animal and vegetable life on our earth! Truly, not only is man fearfully and wonderfully made, that his physical life and the activity of his heaven-born mind should depend on the little white crystal, but great are the works and won- . drous is the wisdom of Him, who, from His throne on high, orders alike the heavenly bodies in their unmeasured space, and the invisible grain of salt in the bowels of the earth and the deep of the sea!

WE too have a Planchette, and a Planchette with this signal merit: it disclaims all pretensions to supermundane inspirations; it operates freelyindeed, with extraordinary freedom; it goes at the tap of the drum. The first touch of the operators, no matter under what circumstances it is brought out to reveal its knowledge, sets it in motion. But it brings no communications from any celestial or spiritual sources. Its chirography is generally good, and frequently excellent. Its remarks evince an intelligence often above that of the operators, and its talent at answering or evading difficult questions is admirable. We have no theories about it.

Mr. Buckle's statement that the philosophical comprehension of history is only to be attained by the digestion of myriads of historic facts, must be applied before any definite conclusion with regard to this mysterious agent can even be hinted at; and it is precisely these facts that are wanting to the man of science.

Accepting this view, we shall certainly be excused for not attempting an explanation of the methods by which this simplest of machinery works, or suggesting the sources of its power. We take its own word that it appropriates the combined intelligence of the company in which it operates, and that this constitutes its working-capital, its entire stock-in-trade.

We feel that we can accept this modest estimate of its power without danger to our faith or morals; and we cannot see that, after such a bland limitation upon the authority of its communications, any body need feel shaky or in danger of being undermined in any favorite particular, by what such a gobetween can say. The chief curiosity about our modest friend is, that it is able to say any thing at all. Our record is to the point that it does say a

great many things very intelligibly, and this without trick, collusion, or imposture of any kind. We present the subject in the light merely of a very curious study. What mental, electric, magnetic, odic, or other forces are lying perdus about us, which may be utilized by inanimate agents, seems to become a legitimate object, or at least a curious subject of inquiry, under the phenomena disclosed by the agile motions of our three-legged agent. This is equally true whether the practical results promise to come to something or to nothing.

The Ghostology of the world, which seems to have accompanied every phase of its historical development, is a nebula which must, some day, be resolved into scientific facts. Planchettism seems to occupy a dim corner in this vague and extensive realm.

We make no pretensions to the possession of a mental telescope which is capable of bringing this dimness to light. We but offer the simple results of our observations. All we claim is, that those observations are absolutely authentic. We at least have not "forced" nor "doctored" them, as some more scientific observers are said sometimes to do.

The era which began with Mesmer, proceeding through the various stages of biology, spirit-rapping, table-tipping, clairvoyance, and other modern mystic developments, has evolved a new phase in Planchette. Such vague indications as raps, such ponderous machinery as heavy tables, might be delusive. This little heart-shaped board certainly contains no trick of spring, or wire, which may impose upon the confiding. A shingle and a pair of common castors, with a Faber's pencil No. 2, furnish you with the required mechanism. You know you are honest yourself. Some of you have friends in whose probity

you can confide as thoroughly as in your

own.

In the instances which we propose to give, exactly as they occurred, we could have no doubt of the good faith of the operators. With my own hands on the instrument, it would have been impossible not to detect any guidance of the machine by the muscular force, either voluntary or involuntary, of the vis-à-vis. Some of the writing was effected with the hands of three people upon the instrument, each with a definite thought in his mind, which was not in the least the communication written by the pencil.

We give the strange statements of the magnetic agent, not for the mere purpose of astonishing the public, but to furnish those who, like ourselves, are really desirous of penetrating the mystery, with some few of the wonderful facts which must abound.

We are all conscious of the existence of involuntary muscular and nervous action, and we are likewise cognizant of an activity of the brain, undirected by will, such as is shown in the ravings of delirium and the curious phenomena of dreams; therefore, leaving altogether aside the supernatural theory, we would wish to see the subject grappled with on purely scientific grounds.

The clever article, republished in Every Saturday, entitled, "A ThreeLegged Impostor," furnished only a few statements. "My Experience with Planchette," in the August number of Lippincott's Magazine, shows grave errors, in underrating the capabilities of the machine. The latter states, for instance, with great positiveness, that Planchette "must always write a running hand," and could, consequently, never have made a cross, as described in the novel, "Who Breaks, Pays."

This is a mistake; our Planchette frequently separates words completely, goes back, and dots an i with precision, writes figures, and returns to put the mark & before them; and on one occasion, being requested to do something beyond its ability, wrote, "I am not to that."

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Besides this, it invariably makes a period when it has done writing a sentence, occasionally employs commas, and frequently has been known to insert an apostrophe, and to put the proper accent over a French vowel, all unexpectedly to the people whose hands were upon the board, they being unaware of what it was writing, and even engaged in conversation upon a different topic, at the same time.

I have seen it draw rough caricatures of people, making the eyes and ears in the right places, without any guidance, and in one case adding a hat to one head after the outline was completed. In contradiction to the other theory of the Lippincott writer, that it is always controlled by the strongest intelligence in the room, I will state that we have known it to give a conundrum that had never been heard by any one of the party; then give the answer, and finally, in the teeth of our united asseverations to the contrary, to affirm that it could "never give any but stale ones," and that the question and answer were in all our minds, which they emphatically were not.

On one occasion, being asked to write poetry, Planchette wrote the first lines of "Thanatopsis," which were not consciously in the minds of any of those present; and what was more peculiar, wrote the word natural instead of visible in the second line, a mistake patent to all who knew the poem-a second time controverting the theory of the Lippincott writer, that its errors are those of the minds employed, which contradiction is confirmed in the fact that, when asked to write its name, it invariably responds "Planchet," though we have never recognized it as other than of the feminine gender. Again, on being remonstrated with for illiteracy, it defended itself by saying, "I always was a bad speler (sic);" an orthographical blunder that no one in the room was capable of making.

But, on the whole, our Planchette is a cultivated and scientific intelligence, of more than average order, though it may be, at times, slightly inaccurate in