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longer period before it lost its connection with the main ocean through Dzungaria.

Arguing from the known to the unknown, there cannot be a doubt but that the Triassic Period was one of great salt lakes. It seems to me that during the Carboniferous Period the land was in many places slowly sinking. This continued for some time until the Permian Period, when great changes took place, and the land once more began to rise and chains of hills to be elevated. The Permian Period, according to Ramsey, was one of great inland lakes and seas. The animal life of the period indicates water and land just emerged and emerging from the water. The process continued throughout the Triassic Period, which was one of innumerable salt lakes of great depth. It was also almost certainly a period when, in many places, huge deserts extended, and when the evaporation far exceeded the rainfall. It would present to our view the same appearance that Asia, in its steppes of the Aralo-Caspian region and South-West Siberia, and its deserts of Mongolia, now presents to us. Whether the great oceans of the Triassic Period were more salty than our own I cannot say, but it seems probable, for unless there is a continual creation of new salt in the ocean to replace the enormous quantities deposited by its waters in the manner above described, the proportion of salt must continually be decreasing. Whatever may have been the saltness of the ancient seas, the salt deposits of the Triassic and some other later periods exceed enormously in thickness any that are now being deposited. The Speremberg boring, to which I referred in my Paper on "The Great European Salt Deposits," "was carried to the depth of 4,172 feet, and was entirely in rock salt, with the exception of the first 283 feet, which were in gypsum, with some anhydrite." Other deposits, as I mentioned, have been many hundreds of feet in thickness. There are points in connection with the early deposits of rock salt

not satisfactorily explained, but it seems clear to me that the general process may be now considered as tolerably well settled, and that our salt deposits of past ages were formed in a similar manner to those of the present time. I can see no reason for believing that volcanoes had anything to do with the early deposits, though this is a favourite theory of some writers. The clay interspersed through the salt shows clearly enough that streams of muddy water ran into the lakes at certain seasons, and the absence of animal or vegetable remains, with but few exceptions, show that, as now, the surrounding country must have been to a large extent barren. The theory that all old salt deposits were formed in salt lakes occupying the lowest portions of the country enables us to understand many peculiarities connected with rock salt, as, for instance, its occurrence in patches of no great extent, but often of great thickness; the clayey matters with which it is impregnated; and, especially in Cheshire, the existence of brine in large quantities. In this latter case the salt occupies the lowest portion of an inland drainage system, and any water percolating through the superior strata would necessarily follow the old drainage lines, and thus reach the salt deposit, and become saturated.

Without pretending to explain everything in connection with our old salt deposits, I hope I have shown how almost certainly they were formed, and what the state of the country in which they were being deposited was, and as a consequence what the general state of a great portion of the earth was during the Triassic Period.

TREVELYAN'S MACAULAY.

BY EDWARD R. RUSSELL.

LORD MACAULAY is a figure of sufficient importance in English literature to demand to be contemplated afresh when any important revelation is made as to the features of his character and the method of his life. And a great communication has lately been made to the public, by the fittest and most competent person, with the effect of apprising us of just that which was unknown in reference to this great author's personality. Apart from the interest of its contents, Mr. Trevelyan's work has been pronounced worthy to rank with two or three great biographies which have distanced all other books of their class. If opportunity served, and it were possible to compare the materials at the command of the good and bad writers by whom our biographical shelves have been stocked, it would be an interesting question, how and wherein such a life as has been produced by Lord Macaulay's nephew comes to differ so notably and acceptably from many others written with similar advantages. On the whole, this Society will not be unwilling to review the career of a writer who did so much to form the minds of men now middle-aged, under the agreeable and yet searching light which has been newly shed upon it. The subject is simple, and of moderate interest, compared with many that we have discussed; and it would not be consistent with the claims of the Society to make it as entertaining as it might be if even a tithe of the anecdotes in Mr. Trevelyan's book were now to be recited. But it is fitting that a literary association should take appreciative notice of this new appraisement of a great literary man.

T

What strikes one first and last in the book is that it makes us love a man whom we have previously only admired. Some of us may not even have greatly admired Macaulay. A fashion of depreciating him set in very early as a reaction from the popular idolatry which resulted from the publication of his History; and that fashion is one of the many which are unthinkingly followed by thoughtful persons. Those who are thus prepossessed will find little in Mr. Trevelyan's volumes to affect their literary judgment. Evidences of profound knowledge and laborious care are so irresistible on Macaulay's own pages that not even detractors require to be convinced by his biographer of the solidity of his acquirements or the thoroughness of his authorship; and where the true lustre of his genius has not been recognised it is not to be expected that the discovery of unlooked-for tenderness of heart and generous self-sacrifice will be specially interesting. But to those who have remained steadily convinced that Macaulay was one of the wisest as well as most brilliant of men-one whose opinions and decisions it is always dangerous to reject-one who often in a sentence gave the result of more effectual thought than goes to the composition of whole rambling pages of some of his censors, clumsy reasoners who make their books their workshops, and absolve themselves from literary style under the poor conceit that they are "thinkers "-those, I say, who have thus estimated Macaulay, and who consider him a safe guide in political theory and a true analyst of the philosophy of character, will experience no common joy when they find that Mr. Trevelyan withdraws a veil of dimness and coldness which has hitherto hung between their hearts and the great writer to whom they have hitherto paid hearty but distant homage.

No one expected that that veil would ever be removed. By the outside world Macaulay was deemed a mere man of books, dry and unsympathetic towards ordinary life, its

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