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Although pompously titled, Neptune’s Gift is a scholarly study of the history
of common salt by Robert Multhauf (Johns Hopkins University Press, £16.50,
ISBN 0 8018 5469 5). Elegantly weaving the ancient and modern, the technological
and the cultural, this reissue of a 19-year-old classic still makes a good read,
even if the glaring gaps—Africa and most of the Arab world, for
instance—yawn even wider.