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.