6io THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY. 



fearlessly, and reverently devote themselves to the search for truth 

 as truth, in the faith that there is a Power in the universe strong 

 enough to make truth-seeking safe and good enough to make truth- 

 tellino' wise. 



UNDERGROUND WATERS AS SOCIAL FACTORS. 



Bt Professor G. A. DADBEEE, 



MEMBER OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY OF SCIENOES. 



FROM the most remote times, the beneficent springs that jet from 

 the interior of the earth have excited the gratitude and admira- 

 tion of men. Like the sea and rivers, they have been deified by the 

 peoples of the Indo-European family ; and the worship that has 

 been given to them, and the fables with which superstition has invest- 

 ed them, express the degree to which popular imagination has been 

 struck by their mysterious origin, their inexhaustible flow, and their 

 secret properties. The Greeks attributed to the fountain of Dodona, 

 in Epirus, the faculty of discovering hidden truths and uttering ora- 

 cles. The fountain of Egeria was supposed to possess the same power, 

 and was intrusted to the guardianship of the Vestal Virgins. The 

 fountains of Castalia, on the flank of Parnassus, and of Hippocrene, 

 near Helicon, were believed to communicate the poetic spirit. 



The Gauls had special veneration for the springs to which they 

 went in search of health. The old romances of chivalry in their fan- 

 cies of a fountain of youth, where spent forces and lost charms could 

 be recovered, were only reproducing a myth of old Greece. 



The perennial nature of springs, which was for a long time re- 

 garded as a sacred mystery, was also their most striking characteristic 

 to those who sought to explain it without reference to religion and 

 poetry. Accoi-ding to Aristotle's idea, which was adopted by Seneca 

 and prevailed till the sixteenth century, " the interior of the earth con- 

 tains deep cavities and much air, wdiich must necessarily be cooled 

 there. Motionless and stagnant, it is not long in being converted 

 into water, by a metamorphosis like that which, in the atmosphere, 

 produces rain-drops. That thick shadow, that eternal cold, that con- 

 densation wdiich is disturbed by no movement, are the always sub- 

 sisting and incessantly acting causes of the transmutation of air." 



Simple and manifest as it ajipears to us now, the origin of springs 

 was late in being recognized. Vitruviua suspected it, in his work on 

 architecture ; but it was Bernard Palissy who, after long studies on 

 tie constitution of the country in which he lived, overthrew the an- 

 cient fancies. According to his "Admirable Discourse on the Nature of 

 "Waters and Fountains, both Natural and Artificial," springs are gener- 

 ated by the infiltration of rain-waters or melted snow toward the inte- 

 rior of the earth, through cracks, till they reach "some place having a 



