Part 5

In Nature nothing is lost, neither can there be increase; design is limitless, and resources inexhaustible; duplicates are never known in form, species, features, and thoughts; thus showing one of Nature’s most positive laws, that mankind shall not accept one central thought, creed, or purpose to be universally followed, as such an order of things would entirely preclude the writing of the few hints herein offered, as the encouragement of any new device for man’s benefit of body or mind, thus leaving everything in a state of stagnation wherein thrift, learning, and progress would be unknown.

Nature never repeats her works, and no two grains of sand or flakes of snow have ever been exactly alike, or ever motionless. Motion causes friction. Friction produces heat. Heat produces life.

XVII.

SCIENTIFIC THEORIES.

The Mediterranean Sea, a body of water between Europe and Africa, nearly 2,000 miles in length, surrounded with most of the noted cities of antiquity, has remained during these thousands of years in an unchanged condition from tides, inundations, or any other disturbing causes. Into this sea through the Strait of Gibraltar has been flowing all this time from the Atlantic Ocean, a river 15 miles wide with an average depth of one and one-fourth miles. This river is reported to have so strong a current that a sailing vessel has difficulty of coming out against it without the help of a favorable east wind. This is a sufficient flow of water to fill the basin of the sea almost yearly, besides the help of all the rivers of Southern Europe and Northern Africa. The reason of no change is given for its location, where evaporation carries off all this influx of water; while some think an undercurrent must exist back into the Atlantic. The first reason seems too ridiculous for a child to give. The water of the Atlantic is so salt as to produce over a pound of salt to a common bucket full. If evaporation is the reason of its equable condition, there could be no other result than a mountain of salt big as the Himalayas long before this time.

The claim of a countercurrent is almost as absurd. That the sea discharges its waters in an undercurrent which passes through the neighborhood of the Caspian and Aral Seas, is more likely than that the waters run backward against a powerful current from the Atlantic and against the centrifugal force that governs the movements of relatively every other water course on the Earth.

So much for that subject for any criticisms that may be offered. Intervening lakes between the Caspian and Aral Seas, seasonably fill with salt water, from the evaporation of which immense bodies of salt are gathered. Where does this supply of salt water come from to leave hundreds of thousands of tons of salt each year?

XVIII.

SURFACE INFLUENCES OF WATER, AND CHANGE OF POLARITY.

Very little thought or attention is paid to the insidious changes produced by water on the Earth’s surface.

Not a day passes, or has gone by, but that a large quantity of material is transferred from one locality to another. Every shower carries from some higher point to a lower, and a certain amount of drift goes toward some ocean. Small streams contribute to the larger ones, and all lead to the great ocean reservoirs. In going across our country many important evidences are to be seen of the immensity of work accomplished by water, in the removal of vast areas and depths of land.

One of the most noticeable and apparent seen by the writer is in the valley of the Rio Grande, in passing through New Mexico and at some other points. For more than 100 miles through this valley in the spring and summer you seem to be following an ordinary creek that gives little idea of the importance attached to such a stream as the Rio del Norte. You see a stream, only thirty or forty feet wide, with steep, abrupt banks, of a sort of adobe soil, some six to ten feet high.

At various places, if you observe, in the bends of the stream these perpendicular banks of earth will be caved off into the water, at frequent intervals. When the next annual freshet comes this loosened earth is carried away toward the Gulf of Mexico, and portions of it reach there while other parts will be lodged at different points on the way.

Now this visible, and natural process, has been going on for ages, and the effect of this incessant work and stupendous result is to be seen far as the eye can reach for hundred of miles.

Here follow the proofs of this long and diligent labor. In all directions you see hills, or immense mounds of land, like inverted deep pans, with flat bottoms, of all sizes, so that their flat tops would include from one acre to hundreds. These mounds all have quite precipitous sides, subject to the wash of every rainy season. As you study the character of these high mounds you will soon be convinced they are not upheavals, as their tops in all directions seem to have a common level. Among these mounds will be occasional ones that have been washed away to a point, and here and there one reduced to half its original height. These hill-tops, if they may be so called, were beyond doubt, at some very remote time in the past, the common level of the country for hundreds of miles, and as they will average 100 feet high or more, it is beyond the power of conjecture to estimate the time required to wash all the vast area away that once existed to make up the level of this valley.

Another similar exhibition is at and near River Falls, in Wisconsin, a town on the east bank of the Mississippi, some thirty miles east of St. Paul. Here the same occurrence seems to have taken place, of a washing away of the greatest bulk of the land, and leaving similar mounds with their flat tops, on many of which are quite extensive farms, approached by very precipitous roads at some favorable point on their sides. These mounds seem to have different strata of soft rock, on which they stand, the lowest and thickest of gray sandstone, quite soft, and must, with the others, be gradually wasting away by frosts, and other agencies to disintegrate. Only one yellowish stratum is strong enough to be used for some building purposes.

While there are hundreds of these mounds that must have once been the level of the whole country, that which is now left is a very level and fertile soil, producing some of the finest wheat, and best quality of potatoes in the State.

These instances are only two out of thousands of a similar nature in this country and all over the world.

The tendency of this drift is mostly as the streams of water run toward the Equator or center of greatest motion.

The vast deserts and other accumulations of sand on the Earth are only the deposits of ancient rivers into then existing seas, which by later surface upheavals, by interior hydraulic forces, have been transferred to other beds, and the deserts like Sahara, Atacama, Mojave, and the Steppes of Asiatic Tartary, remain as evidences.

By these enormous changes of soil it seems rational to believe the uniform and unvarying revolution of the Earth could hardly be possible, and that more or less change during great length of years must be made in form as well as time of revolving. Have not both occurred? Riding down the Quinnipiac Valley to New Haven, Conn., a man is likely to inquire in his mind where those sand plains came from. Some think the Connecticut once flowed there, some the Niagara or St. Lawrence; if so, where did they bring the sand from?

Think of the change bound to come in the future, when the Falls of Niagara cut their way back to Lake Erie, thus letting out its waters, enough to construct it into a large river.

Some channel has evidently been lowered to settle the surface of Lake Michigan, as can be plainly seen in leaving Chicago by boat, that the waters on the western banks were once twenty or more feet above present level. Either the lake has settled or the land has risen. As deserts are nearly all below the ocean surface, is it not presumable that this enormous accumulation of sand has had the effect of such depression, while the transference from other localities has thinned Earth’s crust enough to make easy the internal water pressure to lift up the hills and mountains, through which the great water courses of the Earth are supplied? Think of the transportation of soil to the deltas of the Mississippi, Amazon, Ganges and other rivers amounting to millions and millions of tons every year, and imagine when the time will come when the Earth approaches the form of a wheel, or ring, nearer than a globe, and become a small imitation of Saturn.

Assuming that this is, and has been one cause of the great upheavals, is it not suggestive that the original of the Earth’s surface in its formation millions of years past, was nearly or quite free from hills, and mountains, and the inside as well as exterior has been undergoing radical changes?

Great masses of earth on the outside accumulated by floods and washed from higher points have dammed up and smothered the flow from inside, while the sections of the Earth that have contributed to this mass have been thrown up into exterior mountains, and the depressions made inheavals to a corresponding extent.

From this reasoning it might appear why Africa and Australia, with their vast area of deserts, are less supplied with rivers and lakes proportionally to other continents; the same deficiency of mountains being noticeable. On the other hand, the rest of the continents and islands abound in mountains, lakes, springs and rivers. The great present groups of Islands of Oceanica, will, perhaps, in the distant future, all be joined to one mass, and while they may rise higher, others in present use may sink.

The legend of Atlantis may be repeated in some coming age, and perhaps a new Bible story will record the seagoing experience of another Noah; but if so, it is hoped he will have a bigger ship, and better provided with modern improvements and other sanitary arrangements than the old boat seemed to be for so long and important a voyage. From what has been written on surface influence of water is it not reasonable that polar variations must have occurred through the millions of years Mother Earth has been whirling through space? The writer does not assume to know all claimed in this discussion, being an agnostic in this as well as in spiritual knowledge; but if some full-grown scientific giant will rise up and give any more plausible reasons for why things are as they are, I shall be delighted to sit on some little stool and let him thrust the information into my bewildered cranium.

XIX.

CONCLUSION.

The author of this unscientific work has assumed the task to contradict theories that to him have seemed wrong, although long accepted from scientific authorities.

The world is given to taking statements for granted that emanate from some professional man’s brain, and published in some newspaper or book, whether of real or fictitious origin.

The stories of Wm. Tell, Robinson Crusoe, Washington and his little hatchet, Jack the Giant Killer, Samson and the foxes, Joseph sold into Egypt, St. Patrick’s extermination of toads and snakes, Newton’s discovering the “law of gravitation” by an apple dropping on his head, Noah’s flood, etc.--all of these and hundreds more have passed for current facts by being oft told. Plain stories and simple unadorned tales have small circulation without lies enough mixed in to make them interesting.

Every age has its learned prodigies and scientific minds that are ready to answer any question and solve all obscure matters. When men of early ages discovered on hills and mountains marine shells and other deposits which showed evidence of the bottom of a sea or ocean, and fossil deposits and footprints in rocks, they naturally inquired of the wise men how they came there. Hence quite likely the story of the flood.

When they asked how the people of Europe were white, Asia, yellow, and Africa, black, the solution was, that Noah had three sons who settled, one in each country and produced such progeny. The geography of the world in those early times represented the Earth as having four corners, and surface flat with “jumping off” places on all sides. It is evident the solvers of this “race problem” had no knowledge of America and Australasia. (Time has developed the fact that they either knew about it and lied, or lost sight of two sons that Noah should have had to represent the red and brown races.) It is expected of us to believe that Japheth was white, and peopled Europe; Shem yellow, and settled down to farming in Asia, and Ham black, and went into the monkey and elephant business in Africa. Whether the two other boys, the brown one, that raised Malays, and the red one, that bred and introduced the American Indian, were ever married, I never learned, but conclude it was unnecessary, as they seemed to have as good success in settling up their respective countries as the favorite boys that Noah took, with other live stock, on his yachting trip.

Noah should have really been the man to write on the subject about which this paper treats, as his experience on the “cold-water” question must have given him superior advantages over the writer.

There have been conscientious men of all times who have said and done very silly and unwise things, which, at the time and in the age they were enacted, were considered by public and private consent right and just.

The hanging of witches, buying and selling of slaves, the burning of John Rogers at the stake, his wife and nine small children, one at the breast, as spectators, were considered as just and necessary as an act put in force to destroy crows and kill sheep dogs.

As age succeeds age, new ideas crop out, and what to a former generation appeared true and consistent to their successors oft become a subject of criticism and ridicule. It is to be hoped that future minds will take up the subject of this crude work and make as much advance in the development of Earth’s mysteries as the modern steamship excels in completeness and power the first attempts of Fulton, or the harmonious modern orchestras the hollow music of a Hindoo tom-tom.

To believe what is here written will not insure eternal joys, or to doubt will not incur Divine wrath, or commit a skeptic into the hands of him who walketh in darkness, or to an eternity of pain or woe.

These modest hints are given with the hope that millions of miles of land on Earth now barren and useless, by tapping the generous fountains of water so wisely stored by Providence, may be turned into gardens of beauty, and furnish fruits and sustenance in plenty for coming generations.

While many look upon the Earth as “a vale of tears,” it is the best world we have any reliable knowledge of, and seems well adapted to the wants of animal and vegetable life, if we avail ourselves of the wise and ample provisions Nature has put in our way.

If there is another and better world to come, it is hard to imagine that pearly gates and golden streets can conduce as much to our comfort, or will be as goodly a heritage as one of “sweet fields arrayed in living green,” with shady groves, blooming gardens, and generous fountains of pure sparkling waters, and not the thirsty abode experienced by Dives.

While on this Earth, Nature has supplied with prodigality for this life’s wants, land and water, light and darkness, floods and drouth, and, as learned from Paul, four kinds of flesh (and he didn’t say how many kinds of vegetables) reptiles, insects, worms, bugs, microbes, poison and its antidotes, good people and bad, heat and cold, salt and fresh water, scientists, cranks and fools, yet with all this profusion of gifts, we would be no better off than Dives in Sheol without the indispensable blessing of water supplied by Symmes’s Hole.

A few more questions and done. Why should sea soundings five miles deep be at temperatures below freezing, if, as is claimed, such a depth in land borings would be in a molten condition, and going much farther the prevailing theory would make hell an ice house in comparison with the Laurentian strata?

Where does the fresh water come from admitted to exist in the bottom of the oceans?

Where is the source of fresh water that abounds in the highlands of islands in all latitudes?

Where does the water come from that feeds all the coral reefs and throws up atolls hundreds of miles in extent and nourishes the roots of trees and smaller vegetation?

Why are the atoll inclosures filled with different varieties of fish from the ocean outside?

Why are most of the great lakes at high elevations and commonly on top of divides?

Why are springs more numerous all over the Earth on the hills and mountains than in the valleys?

Why are the shallowest and most enduring wells on the highlands instead of the low?

Why when a country is below sea level is it a desert?

Why did Abraham succeed with his flocks, while Lot (as he deserved) was dried up and burnt out? Answer, Abraham was the smarter of the two, and took to the hills, where he no doubt had observed the waters lasted.

Where did Moses look for water when his followers were famishing for it? He went where water can almost invariably be found, at the foot of a rocky upheaval which he discovered in Horeb.

How could water be cast up from a deep artesian well, bored on a plain with no high land in sight to produce a pressure claimed in explaining their nature and reasons why they flow?

Where do all the rivers found in large caves have their origin?

Where and how does rain water soak into the ground, turn around and come back again with the force shown in bubbling springs and artesian wells?

Why does moss only grow in unfailing wells, and cresses, peppermint, cattails, and water lilies in living waters?

Why in digging wells anywhere in striking gravel do they always find water?

Why do hills and mountains produce more verdure and forests than the plains?

Why are all the volcanoes extinguished by water?

These questions can none of them be answered by any other hypothesis than through a belief in the existence of Symmes’s Hole. Into such a hole sufficient water could flow to supply all the fountains of the Earth, and, what is more, it does flow, and furnishes the wonderful quantities that leap down the mountain sides in stupendous waterfalls, that feed the millions of springs that pour their sweet influences in rippling streams through valleys and meadows. It supplies the great volumes that make Lake Superior and its grand associates in America, and similar great lakes throughout the Earth. Last, but far from least, the phenomenal Gulf Stream that floats the navies and commerce of the world like toys and modifies the climate across an ocean. To supply such resources needs something more than occasional showers that ordinarily evaporate in forty-eight hours, or than equinoctial or shearing sheep storms, of which nine-tenths of their volume runs into the streams and rapidly to the ocean, the great and general reservoir of supply and distribution.

Having endeavored to explain the philosophy of heat and its cause, also other phenomena in brief, I will conclude by paying tribute to the great exterior waters, for their important participation in Nature’s munificent work. The Oceans, after tossing in the fury of the storms and rocking from continent to continent, kissed by tropical winds and frozen by Arctic cold, sunk in caverns, and dashed upon high rocks, after drinking up all the rivers, washing every shore, and visiting every clime, are filtered at the Ice Belt and enter the bowels of the Earth, to come out again by centrifugal force in a fresh and renewed form to contribute to man’s necessities in an even greater benefit than when rolling in majestic waves or floating the commerce of the world.

APPENDIX.

To demonstrate the size of icebergs, fields of ice and glaciers.

Ocean depths, different estimates of.

The character of volcanic eruptions respecting material thrown out and final result of filling with water.

For evidences of how long heat will remain when covered after great fires, the same as in old times when people covered the backlog, and to show the reason for judging the interior to be molten when the heat is developed at insignificant depths by friction leading it to a further volcanic development, or else from an extinct volcano from long time past.

Artesian Waters, Caverns, Earthquakes, Gulf Streams, Lakes, Springs, Wells, Islands, etc.

This appendix is added showing cases something in harmony with the arguments here presented on all these subjects, to which could be added several times as many more.

While most of the points intended for a brief discussion in this book have been hit upon, a few words, with some newspaper clippings on mysterious things, are thought best to be added as a sort of appendix, and of such a character as to prove of benefit to some readers that see fit to avail themselves of a few hints to obtain water, for domestic or irrigating purposes, in an easy way, and where they would naturally least expect to find it.

At my old home, on the farm where I was born, our well, some thirty feet deep, nearly every season went dry. I have lugged hundreds of pails of water from neighbors’ wells and from a spring near the foot of the hill, one-third of a mile away, during my early life.

The hill is little over a half mile long, and less than one-fourth a mile wide from its furthest bases. It is shaped like a box turtle, rising 100 feet or more. There used to be a place near the top, on the east slope, that looked springy. The recent owner, a few years ago, dug into this wet spot, and at a few feet found living water, which is now piped to his house and barns in plenty.

Some years ago my cousin owned the adjoining farm on the north end of this hill, and employed a man to blast out several large iron rocks, scattered about on the surface of the hill. One of these rocks, nearly a rod square, lay almost exactly on the highest part of the hill. This big rock was full of large cracks, which, in my boyhood, I took a young visitor to see, explaining to him that these cracks, no doubt, occurred at the time of the crucifixion, of which pious information I was frequently reminded in later life. This rock was some eight feet deep in the ground. When the last blocks were hauled out the space partly filled with clear water, so cold that it was made available for drinking. Being in the dryest time of the year, the supply appeared to be permanent, which induced the laying of pipes one-third of a mile to barns for watering stock, which before had to be drawn mostly from the wells.