494 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



men to cautiously work out the application of the inventions and dis- 

 coveries in science to art and industry. The difference between the 

 Humanitarian, who is looking at things as they should be, and the 

 sociologist, who deals with things as they are, represents accurately 

 the distance between the Ideal and the Real. The true philanthropist 

 will take that golden mean, — a man who, while maintaining the just 

 equipoise between the emotional, non-discursive side, and his intellect- 

 ual and analytic nature, will give wide range to his finer sympathies, 

 " so uniting philanthropic energy with philosophic calm." 



THE WORLD'S GEYSER-REGIOI^S. 



By a. C. PEALE, M.D. 



THERMAL springs, or those whose mean annual temperature ex- 

 ceeds that of the locality in which they are found, are almost 

 universal in their distribution. This definition, of course, includes 

 more than the springs usually called warm or hot, for, if the tempera- 

 ture exceeds, no matter in how small a degree, the mean temperature 

 of the place in which it rises, it is truly a thermal spring. There 

 will, of course, be a variation according to geographical position. Thus 

 a spring which has a temperature of only a few degrees above the 

 freezing-point would be a thermal spring in Siberia, where the ground 

 is frozen constantly to the depth of six hundred and thirty feet, thaw- 

 ing out only a few feet in summer, and where the mean annual tem- 

 perature is about 12J° Fahr. ; whereas, in the "West Indies, or in the 

 Eastern Archipelago, it would be a cold spring. Warm and hot springs 

 are also widely distributed. With the exception of Australia, no con- 

 tinent is without them, and even here they may be said to exist in a 

 fossil state, for sinters and siliceous deposits are found in New South 

 Wales, in a basaltic and trachy tic region, indicating the former presence 

 of hot springs, and possibly of geysers. Of course, hot springs are less 

 widely spread than those which are simply warm, being found mainly 

 in districts which have been affected by volcanic action, or where the 

 rocks, from which they flow, have been subjected to disturbances such 

 as occur in mountain elevations. Latitude, however, has no effect, for 

 we find them equally hot in the Arctic regions and under the equator. 

 They are found in the frozen fields of Siberia and on the islands of 

 Alaska, while the Andes have boiling springs from one end to the 

 other. Venezuela and Patagonia, at the extremes of South America, 

 both have their hot springs. When we come to geysers, we find them 

 still more limited in their occurrence, and yet even they are confined 

 to no particular quarter of the globe, for each continent appears to 

 have Its geyser-region. North America has the geysers of the Yellow- 



