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?