Part 12

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?