Part 8

At Mammoth Spring, Ark., and under the shadow of the Ozark Mountains, is the largest spring in the world. The water comes up in such a body that it forms a lake about the orifice. The output of the spring is 29,600,000 gallons daily. Records have been kept of it for ten years, and during that time the output has not varied 100 gallons a day nor the temperature a single degree. Winter and summer the spring remains at 59 degrees. The spring is evidently the outlet of some underground river.

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The Poncho springs in Colorado are all on the side of a mountain, and hot and cold water flows from the ground in places not more than three inches apart.

FRESH WATER FROM A SALT BAY.

_From the Florida Times-Union and Citizen._

BELLEAIR, March 3.--The Eldridge spring is quite an attraction to the visitors; it furnishes drink water for the hotel. It is out in the bay, but is cemented up, so as to keep out the salt water, and throws up 100,000 gallons of water per day.

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A species of eyeless fish has been found in a subterranean boiling spring discovered in a Nevada mine.

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The motion of the earth around the sun is 68,305 miles an hour; over 1,000 miles a minute, or nineteen miles a second.

A STRANGE POND.

Hicks Pond, in Palmyra, Me., is a strange body of water. It is only twelve acres in area, but it is more than 100 feet in depth. It has no visible inlet, although a fair sized stream flows from it into Lake Sebasticook. The volume of its waters is not materially affected by either drouth or freshet, and the water is always cold.--_Philadelphia Ledger._

WONDERS BENEATH THE SURFACE.

Workmen engaged in sinking an artesian well in Sandy Valley, near Niria, N. M., struck an open seam, from which a cold stream of air rushed with force enough to remove a 12-pound rock laid over the opening. The air was charged with millions of small yellow bugs, each having but two legs, no wings and a small red circle on his back. They lived but a few seconds after striking the warm outside air. Local scientists are puzzling over the question: How did they get so far down into the earth?--_St. Louis Republic._

FISH IN AN OLD WELL.

Some queer fish were taken out of the recently reopened well on the United States fish station at San Marcos, Texas, says the Louisville _Courier-Journal_. There were several salamanders, varying in length from an inch and a half to four and a half inches. These creatures live on land or water, have human-looking faces, hands and feet, bulldog head, tail of an eel and body of fish. There were also large numbers of shrimps, resembling sea shrimps, only much smaller. It is an artesian well, and everybody wants to know where the creatures come from.

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A wonderful artesian well is in flourishing activity at Huron, N. D. It throws a stream 100 feet high, and the flow is estimated at from 8,000 to 10,000 gallons a minute.

ST. WINIFRED’S WELL.

One of the most copious springs in Great Britain is the famed St. Winifred’s well, near the town of Holywell, in Flintshire. The well is an oblong square, about twelve feet by seven, and its water, say the people of the district, has never been known to freeze. This latter assertion may be true, as besides containing a fair percentage of mineral matter that lowers its freezing point, the well is inside a beautiful chapel, which was erected over it by Queen Margaret, the mother of Henry VII. The water thrown up is not less than eighty-four hogsheads every minute, and the quantity appears to vary very little either in drouth or after the heaviest rain, showing doubtless that its primitive sources are numerous and widely distributed. Sir Winifred’s has been the object of many pilgrimages.

MONTEZUMA’S WELL.

One of the most pleasing natural curiosities in the Territory of Arizona is the pool of water known as Montezuma’s well. It is situated fifteen miles northeast of the old abandoned military post known as Cape Verde. It is 25 feet in diameter, and the clear, pure water is about sixty feet below the surface of the surrounding country. Some years ago certain military officers sounded the pool and found that it had a uniform depth of eighty feet of water, except in one place, apparently about six feet square, where the sounding line went down about 500 feet without touching bottom.

The well empties into Beaver Creek, only about 100 yards distant, the water gushing forth from the rocks as though it were under great pressure. The well is undoubtedly supplied from subterranean sources, possibly through the hole sounded by the army officers years ago. The sides of the well are honeycombed with caves and tunnels, permitting sightseers to descend to the water’s edge.

Montezuma’s well contains no fish. The flow of water from it is the same throughout the season. Popular opinion has attributed the origin of the well to volcanic action, but as the rock surrounding it is limestone, it is more than probable that the action of the water is responsible for its creation.--_Native American._

A REMARKABLE ISLAND.

_From the Pittsburg Dispatch._

A rim of land inclosing a fresh-water lake in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a novelty in the way of islands. There may not be more than one such in the great ocean, and, at any rate, that type of island is extremely rare. This strange spot is Niuafou, which is quite apart from other ocean islands. It lies midway between the Fiji and Samoa groups, and is under the government of the Tonga group, though it is 200 miles from these islands.

It has recently been visited by Lieutenant Somerville, of the British Navy. Some time or other a volcanic vent opened at the bottom of the ocean, and the lava that poured out of it piled up higher and higher, until it finally overtopped the sea. A great volcanic mountain had been formed, and the part of it that came into view above the waste of waters was, of course, an island. As time went on this volcano was the scene of one of those tremendous explosions that sometimes tear mountains to pieces. It was such a cataclysm that blew off the upper 3,000 feet of Krakatoa some years ago.

The explosion at Niuafou had a remarkable result. The interior of the crater was blown out to a considerable depth, leaving only the narrow rim, in this case a nearly perfect ring, around the deep central cavity. Such is the island of to-day.

A thousand Tongans live in the five villages that lie along the outer slope of that crater wall. The drainage from the inner slope has partly filled the cavity, forming a lake whose waters, though slightly alkaline, are drinkable. From the top of the crater rim one looks down upon the peaceful lake within, with its three little islands and the curiously shaped peninsula jutting out into it; and outside the rim is the ever-restless ocean.

WHERE THE VALLEY WAS A HILL IS.

_From the Chicago Record._

SEATTLE, Wash., April 6.--A tremendous upheaval, accompanied by wonderful changes, occurred in the Mount Baker district March 27. What had once been a valley and the bed of a river is now a hill seventy feet high. The noise of the upheaval was heard at Hamilton, ten miles away. A report of the occurrence was brought to the city by D. P. Simons, Jr.

Simons says the noise of the upheaval sounded like heavy thunder. He and his party, who were examining timber lands, journeyed in the direction from which the sound came, and were astonished to see a huge mound of earth, nearly a quarter of a mile square, where formerly there had been a valley. In places the mound was seventy feet high. The Nooksachk River had been turned from its course, and ran around one side of a hill. Nearly in the center of this high bank of earth was a large lake. A forest had formerly occupied the ground, and trees which had escaped destruction rose above the water. There were cracks here and there in the mound large enough to ingulf a horse and wagon. There was a smell of sulphur in the air, and it is Mr. Simons’s impression that the disturbance was caused by gases underneath the mountain.

William Hadley, a trapper, whose wrecked cabin now stands in the center of the huge mound, was absent at the time of the upheaval, and thus escaped death. His cabin was split in two.

REMARKABLE GEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY.

According to a Florida paper a remarkable geological discovery has been made there. The _Galena Advocate_ says: “As P. M. Oliver, in company with a lot of friends, was chasing a fox through his field near Payne’s prairie Saturday night last his horse ran into a sink and in getting the animal out Sunday morning attention was attracted to the numerous curious petrological formations on the sides of the sink. Further examination Monday disclosed immense beds of the petrified bones of the now extinct dinotherium giganteum, icthyosaurus, glyptodon, cuvieri, plesiosaurus, and peterodactyl. This is probably the richest find in the world and was altogether accidental.”

TUNNELLING FOR WATER.

FOLKS OUT IN IDAHO WHO RUN THEIR WELLS INTO A SIDE HILL.

The citizens of Sweet, Canyon County, Idaho, have a novel way of obtaining water for domestic and irrigation purposes. The water is dug out of the hillside, with wells run like tunnels, and not down into the earth as ordinary wells are dug. East of the town, there is a bluff out of which sparkling mountain water can be procured almost anywhere by merely running a tunnel in from twenty to forty feet.

At one point in town, a stream sufficient to irrigate a fine orchard and garden, besides an ample supply for domestic use and for watering all the teams that pass that way, comes pouring out of the 40-foot tunnel. Neither the spring freshets nor the summer drouths affect its flow.

DOMINICA’S BOILING LAKE.

A NATURAL CURIOSITY THAT WAS NOT DISCOVERED TILL 1875.

Mr. Sterns-Fadelle of Dominica has just published a little book giving some interesting information recently obtained about a curious natural phenomenon in Dominica, one of the Lesser Antilles.

This island is only 291 square miles in area. It was colonized by the Spaniards in the seventeenth century and peopled later by French emigrants, who controlled the island uninterruptedly until the eighteenth century, and its resources have since been exploited by English and French; and yet its natural curiosity in the northern part of the island had never been seen or heard of until twenty-eight years ago.

This can be explained only by the fact that the neighborhood of the boiling Lake of Dominica is difficult of access. The lake was discovered by an Englishman, Dr. Nichols, who organized an expedition to explore the unknown part of the island.

One day his little party were clambering up a mountain. They suddenly came upon evidences of sulphur, and a moment later stood looking down into a crater which was filled with boiling water.

Stifling vapors rose from the agitated surface, rumblings of thunder came from the subterranean regions, and near the center of the little lake, where the water was most violently disturbed, the furious boiling lifted the surface ten or twelve feet above the general level. The lake was constantly fed by several small brooks that poured from the heights above the crater.

Mr. Sterns-Fadelle says that the lake is still boiling. It has been found to be at an altitude of 2,490 meters above sea level. In form it is elliptical.

When it is filled with water it is about 200 feet long and less than 100 feet wide. Its depth is unknown. An attempt to touch bottom was made thirty feet from the water edge, where, at a depth of 195 feet, no bottom was reported.

The water is not always in movement. At certain times the surface is calm and glistens brilliantly under the rays of the sun.

At other times it is violently agitated and boils away, exactly like a big tea kettle. But, instead of the singing that accompanies the ebullitions in the kettle, the boiling fluid in this cauldron is accompanied by the gruffest and most unpleasant detonations. Little waves roll up on the narrow shelf of sandy beach, which is covered with a scum of sulphur.

The boiling lake is the center of the present volcanic activity of Grande Souffrière, or Diabolin, a mountain covering an area of about five square miles. The lake is one of the last vestiges of volcanic energy left to the big mountain, which within the historical period has had no great outbursts.

LAKE CICOTT’S SEVEN-YEAR RISE.

INDIANA PHENOMENON REAPPEARS ON SCHEDULE TIME.

INDIANAPOLIS, Aug. 1.--With neither outlet nor inlet that is at any time visible, Lake Cicott, a small body of water in Cass County, has now reached a height which it attains every seven years, and hundreds of acres of fine corn land are covered by several feet of water. The rural mail route, which runs along the lake’s banks, has been abandoned by the carrier, for the water covers it to a depth of three feet and stretches beyond for several hundred yards.

Lake Cicott has been an interesting phenomenon to the people of northern Indiana for many years, but the secret of its rise and fall has never been discovered. It is the only Lake in Cass County and is about one mile wide and about one mile long. The water is clear and cold and perfectly fresh. Its most mysterious characteristic is the fact that it overflows its banks every seventh year. The farmers who own the land upon its banks have become so used to this that they never attempt to cultivate the land in the seventh year, but give it up without protest, as they know it is sure to be claimed by the waters.

The Pottawattomie Indians who inhabited what is now Cass and adjoining counties were familiar with the characteristic of the lake. They believed that its bottom was inhabited by a powerful spirit, which at intervals of seven years caused the lake to overflow. They construed this action as approval of the tribe by the spirit, and watched anxiously for the time to come, for they saw in the rising waters a sure indication that they had done nothing to displease it. The early white settlers became acquainted with the legend and the oldest inhabitant is not able to recall a time that the overflow did not take place when expected.

The water has now reached its highest point, and will soon begin to recede and continue to do so till the old confines are reached. Residents of the locality say that the weather conditions have no effect upon the lake, for its rise in the seventh year takes place regardless of the fact of rain or drouth. Amos Jordan, a veteran of the civil war, who lives on a bluff overlooking the lake, says the only apparent difference between wet and dry seasons when the rise occurs is that the water appears to be colder in time of drouth. What is true of the rise of the waters is also true of their recession, for they gradually disappear regardless of the amount of rainfall in the county.

The phenomenon is explained on the theory that there is a subterranean outlet, which becomes closed in some way and is opened by the pressure of the water when the highest point is reached every seventh year; but this is mere guesswork and nothing has ever been discovered to justify such a theory. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company, which owns a number of ice-houses on the edge of the lake, made soundings at different places before the rise began, and found the greatest depth to be ninety feet.

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Hundreds more of such clippings have been preserved in a scrap book describing similar phenomena all over the Earth, all of which seem solvable through claims herein set forth, in the combined influences of frictional and volcanic heat, and the occasional contact with outpouring streams from the _internal_ ocean of fresh water.

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.