If artesian wells are bored in our arid and now almost worthless lands, wherever a fountain of water is tapped will be an Oasis around which the settler can produce fabulous wealth of crops and obtain forage for live stock. The expense of boring wells will be largely compensated by cheapness of land and bountiful results in vegetation.
XIII.
OASES.
These green spots in the great deserts are the counterparts of Islands in the oceans.
If not thrown up and fed by water upheaval, how are they produced? Are they volcanic? The Oasis of Ammonium, or Siwah, six miles long and eight wide, contains the ruins of the famous temple and oracle of Ammon, visited by Alexander the Great, and celebrated for the fountain of the Sun, whose waters are warm at morning and evening, and cold at noon.
There are several oases not long distances west of the Nile in the Great Desert. The ancients considered them as Islands in a Sea of Sand, but they are really elevated lakes, although not manifesting themselves much at the surface, but underlying so closely as to render the climate too unhealthy to live in during the summer and autumn, being of a swampy character, and yet very productive in winter and spring. Where do these waters soak in to produce such spots in the deserts?
XIV.
THINGS THAT PUZZLE US.
It is frequently a query how the distribution of fish is so general even in the most obscure lakes and springs rising and running from points so isolated as to apparently preclude such specimens from getting there. It seems strange that some species would exist at the head of a stream and not inhabit it throughout. Seas and lakes may, and do exist, without any visible outlets to the ocean, and yet are plentifully supplied with varieties of fish. Now what may be a rational explanation of how they got there. It cannot seem right to say that they originally existed in an adjacent sea or the nearest approach to the ocean, as they are not found in any adjacent waters and are entirely peculiar to their locality, having no neighbors akin. It does not seem as if such would be the case if they became isolated by some remote upheaval and change of surrounding Earth’s surface, as this would only divide up the family and spread the species like immigration from the eastern to the western states.
As asked before, where do these blind fish come from in caves where streams do not seem to have any connection with surface waters? Where do the many specimens come from in the island lakes all over the world? To all these questions there seems a simple answer when we accept the idea that the center of the Earth is the womb that is developing and sending out through every pore, seam, crevice and crack some new seed and form of life to develop a new and strange existence to us on the outside.
It is a Scriptural idea that “We are born of water.”
Creatures that have their inception in the bowels of the Earth cast their eggs as the fish and reptile spawn in our rivers. These eggs or spawn or seeds of life in whatever form are taken in the currents that course through the different strata of the earth by centrifugal force and pressure, taking almost any amount of time in their hermetically sealed transit before they reach an atmosphere in which to develop into a new existence. Any lake, spring, or fountain of water that is a living stream fed by the inexhaustible sources within, may have from that varied storehouse and laboratory of nature any specimen of fish, scale, skin, shell or reptile of any form, that no adjoining or neighboring water may develop.