salt is at least twelve or thirteen yards below the low-water mark of the sea at Liverpool; a fact perhaps not wholly unimportant as regards our ideas of the formation of this mineral.
The thickness of the upper bed of salt at Northwich has been already stated to vary from twenty to thirty yards: that of the lower bed has never yet been ascertained in any one of the mines in this district. The workings in this lower stratum are usually begun at the depth of from twenty to twenty-five yards, and are carried down for five or six yards, through what forms, as will afterwards be mentioned, the purest portion of the bed. In one of the mines a shalt has been sunk to a level of fourteen yards still lower, without passing through the body of rock-salt. We have thus an ascertained thickness of this bed, of about forty yards, and no direct evidence that it may not extend to a considerably greater depth.
Though only two distinct beds of the fossil salt have been met with at Northwich, it has been ascertained that the same limitations do not exist throughout the whole of the salt district. At Lawton, near the source of the river Wheelock, three distinct beds were found, separated by strata of indurated clay; one, at the depth of forty-two yards, four feet in thickness; a second, ten yards lower, and twelve feet thick ; and a third, fifteen yards still further down, which was sunk into twenty-four yards, without passing through its substance. Coal is found and worked within two or three miles of this place, and the only limestone known in the County of Chester, is got from the hills which here form the southern boundary of the plain. In no other parts of the salt district, than at Northwich and Lawton, has the upper bed of rock been worked through.
The strata passed through in going down to the upper bed of rock, are nearly horizontal in position, and very uniform in their structure, consisting in every instance of beds of clay and marl; and
