33 



removed four times a year by a boring apparatus. 

 The Sprudel water boils eggs hard, and is employed, 

 since time immemorial, to scalding poultry and pigs, and 

 to other such purposes, which are more oeconornical 

 than grateful to the eye. The difference of tempe- 

 rature between fountains, coming from the same 

 reservoir, is generally accounted for by the various 

 distances of their orifice from the great focus , and 

 by the warmer or cooler soil upon which the water 

 circulates in the impenetrable meanders of this aquatic 

 volcano. 



The springs of the furious fountain (as Frederick 

 Hoffmann called the Sprudel), the truest emblem of 

 perpetual motion, are in general explained in the 

 following manner: The npper parts of the reservoir 

 fill themselves with carbonic acid gaz, escaping the 

 more freely from the hot fluid mass, as the pressure 

 under which it lays, diminishes in proportion to the 

 evaporation of the gaz. In that free state, the gaz 

 accumulates in the upper part of the cavity 5 when 

 considerably increased, it depresses the surface of 

 the water, which rushes out of the same orifice 5 and 

 these two elements, under the form of vapour, escape 

 together, giving in a minute, without intermission, 

 eighteen or twenty ebullitions, from four to eight 

 feet high. A hollow, unequal and subterraneous 

 murmur accompanies the emission of so much water, 

 which, divided into myriads of globules, falls back 

 in the same vessel (now in the form of a large 

 artichoke) from which it springs, and is lead, by 



