480 Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 
the capillary passage, so as to convert the liquid into vapour, and 
thus change it into a state in which it would probably not be subject 
to the laws which at first had caused its infiltration. 
I have constructed an apparatus, the principal object of which was 
to connect, by a porous plate of fine close-grained sandstone, on the 
one end a closed space in which the tension of vapour measured by 
a manometer was 14 atmosphere, and on the other a space in direct 
communication with the air, half-filled with water, which soon 
reached the boiling-point, but where the pressure could not exceed 
that of the atmosphere. 
Although the thickness of the interposed plate was only 2 centi- 
metres, the apparatus showed that the water is not driven back by 
the counterpressure of vapour; the difference of pressure on the two 
sides of the plate does not prevent the liquid from passing from the 
relatively cold region towards the relatively hot one, by a sort of 
capillary process, favoured by the rapid evaporation and drying of the 
latter. 
The effects of this apparatus, which I cannot explain in detail, 
will manifestly be materially augmented by increasing the thickness 
of the porous plate, and working with vapour at a higher temperature. 
But even these results prove that capillarity, acting in conjunction 
with gravity, can, in spite of very powerful internal counterpressures, 
force water from the superficial and cold regions of the globe to the 
deep and heated parts, where, in consequence of the temperature and 
pressure which it acquires, the vapour becomes susceptible of pro- 
ducing great mechanical and chemical effects*. Do not the prece- 
ding experiments thus touch the fundamental points of the mecha- 
nism of volcanos, and of the other phenomena generally attributed 
to the development of vapours in the interior of the globe, espe- 
cially earthquakes, the formation of certain thermal springs, the fill- 
ing metalliferous veins, as well as to various cases of the metamorphism 
of rocks? Without excluding the primitive water generally supposed 
to be incorporated in the internal melted masses, do not the same 
experiments show that infiltrations from the surface may also be 
operative, so that the deeper parts of the globe would be in a daily 
State of giving and taking, and that by a most simple process, 
although very different from the mechanism of the siphon and of 
ordinary springs? A slow, continuous, and regular phenomenon 
would thus become the cause of sudden and violent manifestations, 
like explosions and ruptures of equilibrium. —Comptes Rendus, Janu- 
ary 28, 1861. 
* It is known that water penetrates into the pores of most rocks, espe- 
cially those belonging to the stratified formations, as is shown by the water 
which they generally contain in nature. Bischoff has long called the atten- 
tion of geologists to this fact. Although the granite on which the sedi- 
mentary rocks rest is usually very impermeable, it has been traversed in 
many places by injections of eruptive rocks. Among the latter there are 
some, like the trachytes, so porous that they might well be particularly sus- 
pected of establishing a permanent capillary communication between the 
water of the surface and the heated masses which form the base of this 
kind of column. 
ere, A any | 
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