Plutarch's Natural Questions (4-6)

INDEED, at first the olive is bitter, and the grape acid; one whereof afterward turns fat, and the other vinous. But the harshness in dates and the austere in pomegranates turn sweet. Some pomegranates and apples have only a

simple acid taste. The pungent taste is frequent in roots and seeds.

Is it because a salt taste is never natural, but arises when the rest are corrupt? Therefore such plants and seeds as are nourished receive no nourishment from salt; it serves indeed some instead of sauce, by preventing a surfeit of other nourishment. Or, as men take away saltness and bitingness from the sea-water by distilling, is saltness so abolished in hot things by heat? Or indeed does the taste (as Plato says) arise from water percolated through a plant, and does even sea-water percolated lose its saltness, being terrene and of gross parts? Therefore people that dig near the sea happen upon wells fit to drink. Several also that draw the sea-water into waxen buckets receive it sweet and potable, the salt and earthy matter being strained out. And straining through clay renders sea-water potable, since the clay retains the earthy parts and does not let them pass through. And since things are so, it is very probable either that plants receive no saltness extrinsically, or, if they do, they put it not forth into fruit; for things terrene and consisting of gross parts cannot pass, by reason of the straitness of the passages. Or may saltness be reckoned a sort of bitterness? For so Homer says:

Out of his mouth the bitter brine did flow,

And down his body from his head did go.

[*]

Plato also says that both these tastes have an abstersive and colliquative faculty; but the salt does it less, nor is it rough. And the bitter seems to differ from the salt in abundance of heat, since the salt has also a drying quality.