23
In the island of Jura and Skye, it frequently serves as a winter food for cattle, which regularly come down to the shores at the recess of the tides to seek for it. In Gothland and Sweden also, the inhabitants boil it in water, and mixing therewith a little coarse meal, feed their hogs with it. And we are informed, that in Jura, and some other of the Hebrides, the inhabitants dry their cheeses without salt, by covering them with the ashes of this plant. These ashes abound with such quantity of salts, that from five ounces of them, may be procured two ounces and a half of fixed alkaline salt, that is, half of their whole weight.
But the most beneficial use which such sea-weed can be put to, in the way of œconomy, is in making kelp; a work much practised in the Western Isles, Orkney, Shetland, Norway, &c.
