Book Review

Does it interest you, dear reader, that the human use of salt began with the start of agriculture on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates in the seventh or eighth millennium B.C.; that before that the human need for salt was met by eating fish, birds, and mammals of various sizes; that the Egyptians used salt for embalming by packing bodies in it for one to two months before wrapping them in cloth; that sodium sulfate was first produced by Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604-1668), thus originating our present-day Glauber's salt; that Sir Humphry Davy, who first isolated sodium . . .