In 1843 John Charles Fremont, American explorer and soldier crossed the Rocky Mountains through South Pass, made his way southwestward to the Great Basin in what is now Utah, and from an elevation glimpsed a sight that stunned him with its beauty and strangeness: We beheld immediately at our feet, he wrote, the object of our anxious searchthe waters of the Inland Sea, stretching in still and solitary grandeur far beyond the limit of our vision. It was one of the grand points of the exploration. I doubt if the followers of Balboa felt more enthusiastic when, from the heights of the Andes, they saw for the first time the great Western Ocean. In those days Great Salt Lake was appreciably larger than it is now. Fremont counted several large islands, rocky prominences jutting up from the waters smooth surface. Most of them are now connected with the dry land; the others are scabrous with dry, powdery salt. Strange Happenings Something strange is happening to Americas most famous inland sea. Stealing water out faster than drought choked natural channels can bring it in, evaporation has lowered the lakes level more than ever before. The saturation point has been reached and passed. Salt is settling in a thick, glassy cake all over the bottom. One of the foremost authorities on Great Salt Lake is Dr. Thomas C. Adams, Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Utah. Study of the lake is a hobby with him; he has observed it since 1927. The lake has always been so salt that a person could not sink in it. No one float in the water tho weighted with twenty pounds or more of iron. Precipitation of salt has had a marked effect upon life in the lake, Professor Adams said. Larvae of two species of small flies which formerly developed in large numbers have disappeared. The hardy, quarter inch long brine shrimps formerly found in great numbers apparently are having a difficult time. They are found in numbers only near where fresh water streams enter the lake. There has also been some disturbance to birds of the island rookeries. Pelicansare found floating in the lake dead or too weak to rise. Some have given as the cause of this that the pelicans settle on the water and salt crystals precipitate on their feathers, preventing them from flying. Bathers Irrigated. One bathing resort has rented a stream of irrigation water to irrigate the lake in the vicinity of its establishment and keeps the water of the lake so fresh that salt does not accumulate on the bathers. The only way to anchor a boat is to proceed into shallow water, drive an iron bar through the caked salt, and tie the anchor to the bar. Great Salt Lake is still the largest inland salt lake in the world. It has a surface area of nearly 2,000 square miles. The worlds other famous salt lake, the Dead Sea in Palestine, has a surface area of only 360 square miles. The Old World lake has been enlarging gradually for a generation or more. It is slightly more saline than the Great Salt Lake. On account of the warmer climate, and hence the higher temperature of the water, more salt is retained in solution. Great Salt Lake has been one of the wonders of the modern world ever since Indians described it to Father Escalante and Father Dominguez, Spanish priests, in 1776. Refuge of Mormons. It was visited in 1842 by Etienne Provost, and in the following year by James Bridger, famous scout and trailmaker. The first settlers were the Mormons, driven by religious persecution from Nauvoo, Illinois. The vanguard of these hardy builders of the West, under the leadership of Brigham Young, reached the Great Basin on July 24, 1847. Great Salt Lake was first surveyed in 1850 by Captain Howard Stansbury, an Army engineer. At that time it was low, but not so low as today. Subsequently the level rose ten feet, reaching its high point in 1870. Since then the level has gone through a fluctuating decline. In 1891 Grove Karl Gilbert , one time President of the Geological Society of America and a noted geologist, discovered a remarkable fact. Great Salt Lake, large as it is, nevertheless represents only a sorry remnant of a much larger prehistoric lake, filled by the icy waters of melting glaciers during the last ice invasion, thirty thousand years ago. To the prehistoric lake, Gilbert gave the name Lake Bonneville, after Captain Benjamin L.E. Bonneville, an early explorer. At its greatest extent it covered 19,000 square miles. Future a Puzzle. The recent shrinking has raised the questionwhether Great Salt Lake will continue this prehistoric process of drying until nothing is left except salt. Professor Adams believes that it will not. The recent changes in leve, he told THE LITERARY DIGEST, reflect in a large measure simply the excesses and deficiencies of rainfall in the drainage basin, and in a smaller measure the encroachment of irrigation upon the water supply. When precipitation again reaches normal, the lake will rise. The amount of salt in the lake remains approximately the same. Professor Adams calculates the total salt at six billion tons enough so that every man, woman and child in America could have fifty tons of it. Tufa mounds covered with sodium chlorid in Great Salt Lake, Utah Science and Medicine Great Salt Lake Shrinks to Lowest Level Light Rainfall and Western Irrigation Cut Water Content, Increase Salinity; To Days Inland Sea Is Remnant of Vast Glacier Fed Basin of 30,000 Years Ago.