Message #168427

[Bathos]

To return to the saltness of the sea: those who create the sea once
for all, or indeed generate it at all, cannot account for its saltness.
It makes no difference whether the sea is the residue of all the moisture
that is about the earth and has been drawn up by the sun, or whether
all the flavour existing in the whole mass of sweet water is due to
the admixture of a certain kind of earth. Since the total volume of
the sea is the same once the water that evaporated has returned, it
follows that it must either have been salt at first too, or, if not
at first, then not now either. If it was salt from the very beginning,
then we want to know why that was so; and why, if salt water was drawn
up then, that is not the case now.

Again, if it is maintained that an admixture of earth makes the sea
salt (for they say that earth has many flavours and is washed down
by the rivers and so makes the sea salt by its admixture), it is strange
that rivers should not be salt too. How can the admixture of this
earth have such a striking effect in a great quantity of water and
not in each river singly? For the sea, differing in nothing from rivers
but in being salt, is evidently simply the totality of river water,
and the rivers are the vehicle in which that earth is carried to their
common destination.

It is equally absurd to suppose that anything has been explained by
calling the sea 'the sweat of the earth', like Empedicles. Metaphors
are poetical and so that expression of his may satisfy the requirements
of a poem, but as a scientific theory it is unsatisfactory. Even in
the case of the body it is a question how the sweet liquid drunk becomes
salt sweat whether it is merely by the departure of some element in
it which is sweetest, or by the admixture of something, as when water
is strained through ashes. Actually the saltness seems to be due to
the same cause as in the case of the residual liquid that gathers
in the bladder. That, too, becomes bitter and salt though the liquid
we drink and that contained in our food is sweet. If then the bitterness
is due in these cases (as with the water strained through lye) to
the presence of a certain sort of stuff that is carried along by the
urine (as indeed we actually find a salt deposit settling in chamber-pots)
and is secreted from the flesh in sweat (as if the departing moisture
were washing the stuff out of the body), then no doubt the admixture
of something earthy with the water is what makes the sea salt.