A large quantity of salt is annually drawn from the
salina: and great piles, some hundred tons in weight, were lying
ready for exportation.
The season for working the salinas forms the harvest of Patagones;
for on it the prosperity of the place depends. Nearly the whole
population encamps on the bank of the river, and the people are
employed in drawing out the salt in bullock-waggons. This salt is
crystallised in great cubes, and is remarkably pure: Mr. Trenham
Reeks has kindly analysed some for me, and he finds in it only 0.26
of gypsum and 0.22 of earthy matter. It is a singular fact that it
does not serve so well for preserving meat as sea-salt from the
Cape de Verd islands; and a merchant at Buenos Ayres told me that
he considered it as fifty per cent less valuable. Hence the Cape de
Verd salt is constantly imported, and is mixed with that from these
salinas. The purity of the Patagonian salt, or absence from it of
those other saline bodies found in all sea-water, is the only
assignable cause for this inferiority: a conclusion which no one, I
think, would have suspected, but which is supported by the fact
lately ascertained, that those salts answer best for preserving
cheese which contain most of the deliquescent chlorides.
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