BRINE, or Pickle, is water saturated with saline particles. It is either native, as the sea-water; or factitious, when formed by a solution of salt in water.
Pickle made according to the common rule, that it should bear an egg, may be sufficiently strong to preserve substances intended for early use. A true pickle, however, for preserving meat, fish, and butter, during a long voyage, ought to be boiled down till the salt begins to crystallize, which is discoverable by a thin scum on the surface of the liquid while it continues over the fire. The water being then completely saturated with salt, the pickle is perfect.
In the salt-works at Upwick, in Worcestershire, a pit yields at the same time three sorts of brine, of different degrees of strength. This pit is worked by a pump, and the strongest salt first brought up from the bottom, is called first man; the next, which is of an inferior quality, is denominated middle man; and the third, or weakest, last man.
Leach brine is what drops from the granulated salt in drying: it is preserved and boiled a second time, being stronger than the brine of the pit. The species of sand found in the Staffordshire brines, after coction, is supposed by naturalists to be produced by that operation, as it was not previously found in the water.
Brine-pan, a place where salt-water is confined and exposed to the heat of the sun, by which salt is obtained by evaporation.
Brine-springs, those saline fountains which yield water for the manufacture of salt. It is supposed that the saline spring at Namptwich, in Cheshire, would be sufficient to yield salt for the consumption of the whole kingdom.
Besides this, there are several other remarkable brine-springs in England, particularly that of East-Chennock, in Somersetshire, which rises twenty miles from the sea; and another at Barrowdale, near Keswick, in Cumberland. The latter rises in a plain near a bog, and sixteen gallons of the water yield one of pure salt, which is the more remarkable, as an equal quantity cannot be obtained from less than twenty-two gallons of the waters of the German ocean.
There are several other salt-springs beside those above mentioned, particularly at a place in Durham, called Salt-water Haugh, where a multitude of saline springs rise in the river Wear, to the extent of about forty yards in length, and ten in breadth. One of these, which issues from a rock, is so strong, that in the space of a hot summer's day the surface is covered with pure crystallized salt. In these springs the water is strongest at the bottom, and richer in dry than in wet weather. They generally yield four ounces of salt from a pound of brine. It is probable that there is an immense mass of fossil salt in the bowels of the earth in the counties where these springs arise. There are several other substances dissolved in their water beside salt, particularly sulphureous matter, an impure ochre which discolours the brine, but speedily subsides; and in most, a selenitic earth is found deposited at the bottom of the salt-pans.