Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/259

Rh that this practice is a survival from the days when the Zuñis were inhabitants of the cliff dwellings. By careful computation it has been ascertained that the amount of provisions invariably carried would be the proper allowance for the time consumed in a journey from the cliff dwellings to the place where the salt is obtained and back again.

From the careful preservation of all its features this salt-getting expedition would appear to have been at one time a ceremonial of religious importance. In the old cliff dwellings are found peculiar little bags containing salt; and at the present time a certain amount of the mineral, when brought to the villages, is set aside as sacred and preserved in little bags almost identical with those found in the ancient dwellings.

Where men live on milk and raw or roasted flesh, sodium chloride is an unnecessary addition. Thus the Numidian nomads in the past did not, and the Bedouins of Hadramant of the present do not, eat salt with their food. On the other hand, a cereal, vegetable, and boiled meat diet calls for salt. Livingstone's South Africa contains a very interesting passage treating this subject. The author says, speaking of the Bakwains: "When the poor who had no salt were forced to live on an exclusively vegetable diet they were troubled with indigestion. The native doctors, aware of the cause of the malady, usually prescribed some of that ingredient with their medicines. The doctors themselves had none, so the poor resorted to us for aid. We took the hint, and henceforth cured the disease by giving a teaspoonful of salt, minus the other remedies. Meat or milk had the same effect, though not so rapidly as salt. When I was myself deprived of salt for four months at two distinct periods, I felt no desire for the condiment, but was plagued by a longing for meat and milk. This continued as long as I was confined to exclusively vegetable diet, and when I procured a meal of flesh, though boiled in fresh rain water, it tasted pleasantly salt. Milk or meat or salt, obtained in however small quantities, removed entirely the excessive longing and dreaming about roasted ribs of fat oxen and bowls of cool, thick milk."

The consumption of salt has become almost a necessity to most peoples through long-continued habit; but, where tribes have been cut off from the use of it for a lengthened period, the taste for the mineral has almost or entirely died out. For instance, during the reign of Montezuma I, and from that time to the conquest, the Tlascaltec territory was completely surrounded by the Aztecs. Thus communication with the coast was prevented, and this people were compelled to do without salt among other luxuries. It became so rare that, though the nobles smuggled in a little for their own use,