"A Curious Phenomenon.—When the track of the railroad between Brunswick and Bath was being graded, in crossing a meadow near the populous portion of the latter city, the 'dump' suddenly took on a sinking symptom, and down went the twenty feet fill of gravel, clay, and broken rocks, out of sight, and it was a long, long time before dirt trains could fill the capacious stomach that seemed ready to receive all the solid material that could be turned into it. The difficulty was at length overcome, but all along the side of the sinkage the earth was thrown up, broken into yawning chasms, and the surface was thus elevated above its old watery level. Since that time this ground, thus slightly elevated, has been cultivated, and has yielded enormously of whatever the owner seemed disposed to plant upon it. Some three months ago, by some means unknown to us, the underlying peat took fire, and for weeks, as we had occasion to pass it, we noticed the smoke arising from the smouldering combustion beneath the surface. Rains fell, but the fire burned, and the smoke continued to arise. Monday we had occasion to pass the spot, and though nearly a week's rain had been drenching the ground, and though the surface was whitened with snow, and though pools of water were standing upon the surface in the immediate neighborhood, still the everlasting subterranean fire was burning, and the smoke arising through the snow."
[496] One of the sublimest, and at the same time most fearful suggestions that have been prompted by the researches of modern science, was made by Babbage in the ninth chapter of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. I have not the volume at hand, but the following explanation will recall to the reader, if it does not otherwise make intelligible, the suggestion I refer to.
No atom can be disturbed in place, or undergo any change of temperature, of electrical state, or other material condition, without affecting, by attraction or repulsion or other communication, the surrounding atoms. These, again, by the same law, transmit the influence to other atoms, and the impulse thus given extends through the whole material universe. Every human movement, every organic act, every volition, passion, or emotion, every intellectual process, is accompanied with atomic disturbance, and hence every such movement, every such act or process affects all the atoms of universal matter. Though action and reaction are equal, yet reaction does not restore disturbed atoms to their former place and condition, and consequently the effects of the least material change are never cancelled, but in some way perpetuated, so that no action can take place in physical, moral, or intellectual nature, without leaving all matter in a different state from what it would have been if such action had not occurred. Hence, to use language which I have employed on another occasion: there exists, not alone in the human conscience or in the omniscience of the Creator, but in external material nature, an ineffaceable, imperishable record, possibly legible even to created intelligence, of every act done, every word uttered, nay, of every wish and purpose and thought conceived by mortal man, from the birth of our first parent to the final extinction of our race; so that the physical traces of our most secret sins shall last until time shall be merged in that eternity of which not science, but religion alone, assumes to take cognizance.
APPENDIX.
No. 1 ([page 19, note]). It may be said that the cases referred to in the note on p. 19—and indeed all cases of a supposed acclimation consisting in physiological changes—are instances of the origination of new varieties by natural selection, the hardier maize, tomato, and other vegetables of the North, being the progeny of seeds of individuals endowed, exceptionally, with greater power of resisting cold than belongs in general to the species which produced them. But, so far as the evidence of change of climate, from a difference in vegetable growth, is concerned, it is immaterial whether we adopt this view or maintain the older and more familiar doctrine of a local modification of character in the plants in question.
No. 2 ([page 24, note]). The adjectives of direction in -erly are not unfrequently used to indicate, in a loose way, the course of winds blowing from unspecified points between N.E. and S.E.; S.E. and S.W.; S.W. and N.W. or N.W. and N.E. If the employment of these words were understood to be limited to thus expressing a direction nearer to the cardinal point from whose name the adjective is taken than to any other cardinal point, they would be valuable elements of English meteorological nomenclature.
No. 3 ([page 31]). I find a confirmation of my observations on the habits of the beaver as a geographical agency, in a report of the proceedings of the British Association, in the London Athenæum of October 8, 1864, p. 469. It is there stated that Viscount Milton and Dr. Cheadle, in an expedition across the Rocky Mountains by the Yellow Head, or Leather Pass, observed that "a great portion of the country to the east of the mountains" had been "completely changed in character by the agency of the beaver, which formerly existed here in enormous numbers. The shallow valleys were formerly traversed by rivers and chains of lakes which, dammed up along their course at numerous points, by the work of those animals, have become a series of marshes in various stages of consolidation. So complete has this change been, that hardly a stream is found for a distance of two hundred miles, with the exception of the large rivers. The animals have thus destroyed, by their own labors, the waters necessary to their own existence."
When the process of "consolidation" shall have been completed, and the forest reëstablished upon the marshes, the water now diffused through them will be collected in the lower or more yielding portions, cut new channels for their flow, become running brooks, and thus restore the ancient aspect of the surface.