F. T. Ives

“ 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. ”

“ The Earth gets its heat mostly by friction through its atmosphere.
[84] The mass of atmosphere surrounding our planet is like an ocean made up of gases and elements that produce both water and land. The revolution of the Earth through that atmosphere at the rate of 1,000 miles an hour, seventeen miles a minute, or nearly four miles every second, is something as incomprehensible to our minds as the distance to the Sun. Only for this friction for a certain distance from the surface, the same condition of cold would no doubt exist on the surface as on the tops of the high ranges of mountains. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The whole panorama of valley, mountain, glacier, and snow has an effect, at an elevation, of majestic repose. The observers were far above the noises of avalanches and rivers and nature’s forces were reduced to mere insignificance as they gazed thousands of feet below them upon the scenery. Many of the mountains they saw had not before been seen by human eye. ”

“ Has any explorer ever seen such a body of ice break off from a glacier that must have covered scores of miles square when it started?
[21] As an arrow shot into the air bends its course to follow the heavy end, as truly do the heavy elements in the water manifest themselves at the center of the Earth’s motion, and the saltness of the Equatorial waters is much stronger than approaching the polar holes, which last term might be used with good reason instead of poles.
There seems to be with all Arctic explorers the obstacle presenting itself, termed the ice belt. ”

“ Imagine what an iceberg must have been in starting from seventy-fifth to eightieth parallel of latitude and floated through all kinds of weather till midsummer, arriving off the coasts of Newfoundland, and then 300 to 500 feet high with seven times its height under water and so large as to take hours and even days or weeks to pass the main mass of ice and its fragments that have sloughed off. ”

“ All heat is produced by friction, in the absence of which there can be no heat. This claim made, and presumably well established, how can there be any central heat of the Earth, revolving on nothing but an imaginary center? Will any scientist explain at what point heat begins to generate? It would appear as difficult as to accurately fix the point where moral responsibility commences in a child, or just when the wheel of time will cease to revolve. At whatever point heat begins, is it supposable that it works internally or outward? ”

“ The essential need on Earth’s surface for growth of vegetation, and the sustenance of life, depending thereon in some form, is in universal irrigation, which Nature failed to furnish by its internal provision of water with its outflow of springs and lakes, except by artificial use. The rainfall on the Earth is no more intended for filling of springs, lakes and seas than it is for supplying us with fuel. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Very little thought or attention is paid to the insidious changes produced by water on the Earth’s surface.
Not a day passes, or has gone by, but that a large quantity of material is transferred from one locality to another. Every shower carries from some higher point to a lower, and a certain amount of drift goes toward some ocean. Small streams contribute to the larger ones, and all lead to the great ocean reservoirs. In going across our country many important evidences are to be seen of the immensity of work accomplished by water, in the removal of vast areas and depths of land. ”

“ Every lake is but a mammoth spring, or reservoir of numerous springs that feed into its base. The provision by nature of this inexhaustible reservoir of fresh water is beyond doubt the most essential of any other bounty bestowed upon every living thing on Earth’s surface. The principle of centrifugal motion and power is here developed to its highest advantage.
Every man that has ever turned a grindstone at early morning to prepare a dull scythe for its day’s work, has no doubt observed the result of frequent pouring on of water. ”

“ Here is an island eighteen miles in diameter surrounded by salt water with an elevation of 1,800 feet, and 1,200 feet above the ocean are three fine lakes, Eagle Lake, Crooked Lake, and Echo Lake. In which lakes are trout weighing eight or ten pounds. On this small island are to be found thousands of springs pouring out from every crack and crevice. The water is pure and clear as in all such cases. Where does it come from? No more generous gift to man and all animated nature, has been bestowed by Providence than the universal distribution of springs all over the world. ”

“ Have Volcanoes any specific use in Earth economics? Do they tend to open up water courses from the interior and by their upheavals on the continents and islands of the Earth create natural elevated reservoirs from which the lower regions of Earth can be irrigated? Do they not send out certain gases to mingle in the atmosphere, producing favorable results in vegetation and animal life? Are not the vicinities of volcanoes noted for the fine fruits and wines in latitudes in which they grow? ”

“ That the Sun is a vast body of earth and water hardly admits of a doubt, and its warmth and light is due to the same influence largely that the Earth and every other planet experiences.
There is not and cannot be a complete consumption [85] of material in the immutable affairs of Nature, as there must be an eternal and exhaustless interchange of supply and demand. While our forest and other fuel supply is being burned, another is growing and something forming to keep up the balance.
In Nature nothing is lost, neither can there be increase; design is limitless, and resources inexhaustible ”

“ Where does the water come from that feeds all [100] 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?
Why are most of the great lakes at high elevations and commonly on top of divides?
Why are springs more numerous all over the Earth on the hills and mountains than in the valleys?
Why are the shallowest and most enduring wells on the highlands instead of the low?
Why when a country is below sea level is it a desert? ”

“ Here is a planet they tell us is seven hundred times as large as the Earth, but its density only ninety times as great. His mean diameter about 70,000 miles and compression one-tenth, so that the polar diameter is 3,500 miles less, and the equatorial 3,500 miles more than its mean, thus duplicating largely the shape and globular form of the Earth. Is it not reasonable, then, to suppose that the lack of density has allowed its revolutions to produce its series of rings, those most dense being outside? ”

“ That the presumption of rainfall furnishing the supply for all of our lakes, springs and wells has never been questioned seems almost discreditable to the observing talent of our age. Whatever the character of rainfall, either by protracted storm or sudden and copious showers, it cannot escape our notice that the largest portion of the water runs from the highlands to the lowlands into the gulches and small streams, and thence to the rivers, into the ocean; so that the percentage of water retained by the soil is much smaller than that which runs away. ”

“ The first element to consider will be fire, or heat, without which, it seems safe to assert, nothing can be produced from the Earth, or by the devices of man. To draw a base line to work from, we will begin at the polar center of the Earth’s motion. The Earth, unlike any other object that perpetually revolves that we see or know of, does not have a shaft, or axle, or anything [7] to create friction, and, therefore, heat. There is but one word in the English language that tells what will produce heat; that is friction, which may claim motion for its parentage. ”

“ The bounties of Nature are so great and common that they fail to attract our attention to the extent of some trifles that come new into our way from day to day. One of the greatest provisions of Nature, as universal as air and Earth, is the millions of springs gushing up through the pores of the Earth in every country and clime. To make this provision of fresh water ample, needs very large reservoirs for supplies. The amplitude of this reservoir, if the situation is as claimed in this book, it is believed everybody will admit. ”

“ The Earth is producing its own warmth by friction in its atmosphere the same as a wagon-wheel would do by being rapidly revolved inside of a loose tire. The atmosphere is virtually a tire surrounding us, through which the Earth revolves, and by Friction produces the warmth as really as a man warms his hands by rubbing them together.
That the Sun can be an inconsumable body of fire, or that it can become extinct is a most preposterous belief. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [98] 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. ”

“ It may not be ill-timed to assert at this point the belief that all planetary bodies are hollow and cool, not one in a molten condition or giving out heat, but only generating heat in their own atmospheres, thus giving out light, which we, in our ignorance, attribute to a mass of intense heat or a globe in combustion. ”

“ The humble and obscure individual who presumes to offer the few succeeding pages of crude ideas may be classed among pigmy Cranks, but, nevertheless, feels impelled to sow a little thoughtful seed on a subject that, to his knowledge, has never been discussed; and with a hope that such seed may some of it fall in good ground, and spring up a crop of criticism that may ultimate in some better mind taking it up and demonstrate with the success that the writer believes it merits.
To prove that the Earth was round required a long time and a serious amount of persecution. ”

“ The Earth is filled with immense supplies of fuel, consisting in stores of coal, sulphur, oil, gas, limestone, etc. While it is claimed that at the imaginary axis of the Earth there can be no friction, yet when the surface is approached with all its weight of mountains and continents, here friction begins to put in its work. It is very doubtful if any volcano exists, or ever has existed whose fires [41] go to the depth of 500 miles, and more likely not half that distance. ”

“ As no explorer has reached much nearer than 750 miles of the supposed poles, it is reasonable to suppose that the open sea, so-called, but really a hole must be nearly fifteen hundred miles in diameter. Various evidences have settled that question in the minds of navigators, the most important of which is that the sea fowls still fly beyond the reach of man’s explorations. The fact alone that wild geese, ducks, and other sea fowl go on to some feeding ground is enough to settle all doubts or arguments for or against the theory of an open sea of fresh water around the supposed poles. ”

“ Under the ice river is always flowing a stream of water, and many air holes and openings are found upon the surface at different points, no doubt produced by the influence of spring water coming in of temperature above freezing or at the usual fifty-two degrees, about the average of fresh water springs in all latitudes. This conglomeration of influences to make a glacier shows the absurdity of having such solid masses break off, as claimed to be seen by Arctic explorers, large enough to remain intact well down into the Atlantic Ocean. ”

“ While the climate [16] of the Sun may be hotter than that of the Earth, Nature can adapt itself to any condition of heat or cold.
Thus far the argument has been chiefly in considering the influence of heat by friction on planetary surfaces. Later this influence will be briefly taken up to demonstrate its interior effect in producing earthquakes and volcanoes.
For a diversion, we will for a while consider the effect of centrifugal force on the Earth. The Earth gives many manifestations of said force in the shape of the continents, courses of rivers, outlets of bays and ranges of mountains. ”

“ The sun is subject to the same conditions as the Earth, as far as obtaining heat, and this work will claim that we receive no more direct heat from the Sun than from Mars or Venus.
Taking the first proposition, that in the absence [14] of friction there can be no heat or light, the assumption is that the Sun generates its heat and light by its wonderful revolution in its own atmosphere. With a diameter of 860,000 miles, and revolving in 25.38 days, the Sun is moving through its atmosphere a mile in eight-tenths of a second, and seventy-five miles a minute, and 4,500 per hour. ”

“ With an atmosphere of relative density of the Earth’s, it is easy to see what a pyrotechnical and electrical display this would reveal to the lens of a telescope, giving the impression of fire on an inconceivable magnitude. It seems unreasonable that in the realm of Nature anything, or that anywhere fuel can be found for an eternal fire except in an old orthodox Hell. ”

“ The concentrated rays of the Sun at midday of course bring them so closely together, and direct, that the Earth’s revolution comes squarely across them, as can be demonstrated across the teeth of a comb, thus showing a greater pressure than drawn obliquely.
That heat can come directly from the Sun seems an impossibility without some medium of contact, which through the coldness and a barrenness of space does not seem to exist. ”