od, pure
salt, which is produced by natural evaporation on its banks. It would be
interesting, if it were possible, to explain why it is that the water is
so salty. Various reasons have been advanced from time to time for this
phenomenon, but none of them are sufficiently practical or tangible to
be of great interest to the unscientific reader.

It is just possible that this wonderful lake may in course of time
disappear entirely. Some years ago its width was over 40 miles on an
average, and its length was very much greater. Now it barely measures
100 miles from end to end and the width varies from 10 to 60 miles. In
the depth the gradual curtailment has been more apparent. At one time
the average depth was many hundred feet, and several soundings of 1,000
feet were taken, with the result reported, in sailors' parlance, of "No
bottom." At the present time the depth varies from 40 to 100 feet, and
appears to be lessening steadily, presumably because of the
extraordinary deposit of solid matter from the very dense waters with
which it is filled.

The lake is a bathers' paradise, and the arrangements for bathing from
Garfield Beach are like everything else in the land of the Mormons,
extraordinary to a degree. In one year there were nearly half a million
bathers accommodated at the four principal resorts, and so rapidly are
these bathing resorts and establishments multiplied, that the day is not
distant when every available site on the eastern shore of the lake will
be appropriated for the purpose. As a gentleman who has bathed in this
lake again and again says, it seems preposterous to speak of the finest
sea-bathing on earth a thousand miles from the ocean, although the
bathing in Great Salt Lake infinitely surpasses anything of the kind on
either the Atlantic or Pacific coasts.

The water contains many times more salt, and much more soda, sulphur,
magnesia, chlorine, bromine and potassium than any ocean water on the
globe. It is powerful in medicinal virtues, curing or benefiting many
forms of rheumatism, rheumatic gout, dyspepsia, nervous disorders and
cutaneous diseases, and it acts like magic on the hair of those
unfortunates whose tendencies are to bald-headedness. It is a prompt and
potent tonic and invigorant of body and mind, and then there is no end
of fun in getting acquainted with its peculiarities. A first bath in it
is always as good as a circus, the bather being his or her own trick
mule. The specific gr