ABSORPTION BY THE EARTH. 
437 
character, and have investigated the rationale of the attendant 
phenomena. The distribution of these waters has been mi¬ 
nutely studied with reference to a great number of localities, 
and though the actual mode of their vertical and horizontal 
transmission is still involved in much doubt, the laws which 
determine their aggregation are so well understood, that, when 
the geology of a given district is known, it is not difficult to 
determine at what depth water will be reached by the borer, 
and to what height it will rise. 
The same principles have been successfully applied to the 
discovery of small subterranean collections or currents of water, 
and some persons have acquired, by a moderate knowledge of 
the superficial structure of the earth combined with long prac¬ 
tice, a skill in the selection of favorable places for digging 
wells which seems to common observers little less than mirac¬ 
ulous. The Abbe Paramelle—a French ecclesiastic who de¬ 
voted himself for some years to this subject and was extensively 
employed as a well-finder—states, in his work on Fountains, 
that in the course of thirty-four years he had pointed out more 
than ten thousand subterranean springs, and though his geo¬ 
logical speculations were often erroneous, the highest scientific 
authorities in Europe have testified to the great practical value 
of his methods, and the almost infallible certainty of his pre¬ 
dictions.* 
Babinet quotes a French proverb, “ Summer rain wets 
nothing,” and explains it as meaning that the water of such 
rains is “ almost totally taken up by evaporation.” “ The 
rains of summer,” he adds, “ however abundant they may be, 
do not penetrate the soil to a greater depth than 15 or 20 
centimetres. In summer the evaporating power of the heat is 
five or six times as great as in winter, and this power is 
exerted by an atmosphere capable of containing five times as 
much vapor as in winter.” “ A stratum of snow which pre¬ 
vents evaporation [from the soil] causes almost all the water 
that composes it to filter down into the earth, and form a 
* Paeamelle, Quellenhunde, mit einem Voncort von B. Cotta, 1856. 
