“Eternal Power,
Grant me through obvious clouds one transient glimpse
Of thy bright presence in my dying hour.”
After some weeks at Bath I went to Germany, staying with my daughter,
Mrs. Dupré, at Stassfurt, where, underground, had been achieved one
of Nature’s most wonderful geological operations. A tidal sea, once
extending over many hundred square miles of Prussian Saxony, was
gradually blocked out from its connection with the Baltic, and had
evaporated, depositing its salts in the order of their solubility, but
still replenished at high tide through countless ages, until at last, cut
off from its connection with the main waters, it dried up, and during
other countless ages became covered two hundred feet deep with soil.
The first deposit in this vast bed of salts was common salt (chloride
of sodium), a deposit so thick that it has been drilled to a depth of
one thousand feet, and not yet pierced through. On the surface of this
deposit is found a considerable bed of chloride of potash, with boracic
salts, bromides, and others of great commercial value.
Stassfurt is an ancient village some twenty miles from Magdeburg. It has
a fine old church, unwittingly founded on a rock of salt, or at least
above one; not the same thing as a rock, for the miners have been under
the church’s foundations, and the earth has quaked and the walls have
been split and shaken, almost to falling. The stork has built its nest
upon its tower from time immemorial, and is the sacred bird of Stassfurt.
And that vast salt bed, now a mine whose streets reach for miles under
the town and country! By torchlight it glitters with reflected flame,
surpassing in brilliancy all fairy land! There lies a dead sea, with salt
enough to supply the world for ever.
Thirty or forty lofty chimneys are erected over it, and are, as new
monuments, strangely marking the spot where a sea had laid buried for
ages unknown.
This is in Prussian Saxony, whence came our invaders in the olden time.
There is to be seen an old Saxon church in a village just outside the
town; one descends into it by steps. A dust of ages, vagrant as the wind,
but which loves to take shelter against walls, and to bury them as time
goes on, has settled itself for the time to come. Churches exactly like
this church are to be seen on the hills of Bath, with their Saxon tower.
Inside it are the high pews and the gallery, at one end of which, on
the right, near the pulpit, is the pew of the squire. It is old England
before it migrated to our shores.
Thus our ancestors brought their institutions here; so we in turn take
them with us to newer lands.
My son-in-law was Professor of Chemistry at the Westminster, in
succession to the gifted Dr. Marcet, whose assistant he had been for some
years. He resigned his place, and his brother Augustus Dupré was elected
in his stead, while he went to Stassfurt to do chemistry on a larger
scale, extricating tens of thousands of tons of potash from its chlorine.
He was then the father of a baby, he has now two grown-up daughters and
three grown-up sons.
I stayed several weeks at Stassfurt. My son Cecil was there under Dupré.
He had been a student at the Westminster laboratory; he is now Chief
Inspector of Explosives at Melbourne in Victoria.