What Makes The Sea Taste Like Salt?
The sun sucks up the water from the sea, but it sucks up nothing else. The salt of the sea has been brought to it by the rivers. These, as they come down from the land, melt away from the land anything that water can melt, and this they carry into the sea. River water contains salt, too, only so very little salt that we notice nothing. Sea water is so much saltier chiefly because it contains the salt that the rivers have been carrying down to it for ages past. One of the commonest kinds of salt in sea water is ordinary salt that we use at table, but there are a great number of other kinds too. We must remember that, though table salt is the only kind of salt we usually think of, yet “salt” is really only a general word for a large number of compounds, like one another to some extent, yet different. It is a mixture of a great number of these that helps to make the sea salt.
