UNDERGROUND WATERS AND MINERAL VEINS. 633 



mon iDarn-yard fowls of a degree of intelligence usually attributed 

 only to much, higher animals. Surely they show something far 

 above the instincts familiar to all students of Nature. The sense 

 of mortification in an individual has only a distant relationship 

 to the rare instinct which makes chickens that were never out of 

 the heart of a great city, and could not possibly have seen a more 

 formidable bird than a pigeon, skurry for shelter when the far-off 

 cry of the common hen-hawk is imitated in their presence. It is 

 impossible for the bare narration of anecdotes to convey that cer- 

 tainty of intelligence and human emotions which early gave my 

 brother and myself a sense of nearness to our farm-yard pets. 

 We saw the countless little tricks of manner, the changes of ex- 

 pression, the indefinable consciousness which can never be appre- 

 ciated save by those who, like ourselves, will literally live among 

 unconfined and well-treated poultry. The purpose of this tribute 

 will be served if it shall raise the reputation for intelligence of the 

 barn-yard fowl, not indeed to the level of our belief, but somewhat 

 above that on which the reader has heretofore placed it. The les- 

 son is the oft-enforced truth that the greater part of what has 

 been held by the majority of mankind to be exclusively human 

 belongs only in less degree to the lower animals as well. 



•*»*■ 



UNDERGROUND WATERS AND MINERAL VEINS. 



Bt Peof. G. a. DAUBEilE. 



BEFORE occupying himself with the great masses that con- 

 stitute the crust of the earth, and yielding to cupidity rather 

 than to scientific curiosity, man attempted to discover the genesis 

 of certain minerals. Have the middle ages not seen more than 

 one alchemist, in his passionate search for the philosopher's stone, 

 trying to discover the secret of Nature, and reproduce the processes 

 by which she has created in the rocks gold, the most noble, as they 

 said in those days, of the metals, and certainly the most precious ? 



According to the system of Thales, adopted by Aristotle, water 

 was the universal principle of things. " If the elements are born 

 of one another," wrote Seneca, " why may not the earth be pro- 

 duced from water ? Like the human body, the earth includes a 

 number of humors, some of which, hardened when they came to 

 maturity ; whence the metallic earths, and stony substances, which 

 are nothing but petrified liquids." 



The hypotheses relative to the nature of mineral substances 

 which were current down to the last century are related to this 

 doctrine. Bernard Palissy, one of the most penetrative minds of 

 his time, wrote : " All mineral matters that you call dead bodies 



