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.