6 
CREATURES OF MYSTERY 
river and there view the mute evidence of this ever-present, if 
invisible force. Even within the river channel, invariably on 
the east shores, one will find new sand dunes in the process of 
formation before your very eyes—mammoth mounds of snow- 
white, “barking” sand. The deep part of the channel, where 
the waters move with more force and velocity are to the west 
always, the waters of the river being impounded exert a con¬ 
stant pressure against its western embankment. As the waters 
of the raging torrent form a whirl the sand crystals, being 
heavier and less buoyant than the finer structure of the cor¬ 
roding clay banks on the west, are dropped as they whirl into 
the comparatively still waters on the eastern shores of the 
river, thus forming new sandbars, eventually extending the 
boundaries of the sand ridges farther and farther west as the 
river channel consumes more and more of the clay hills in its 
silent march westward—ever westward. 
The next step in our process of reasoning might well appear 
to bear no relationship whatever to the subject under discus¬ 
sion. But let’s see. Galileo, that profound thinker, who gave 
so much to the world when Roman culture was in full bloom, 
braved the wrath of his church by attempting to prove that 
the sun did not really move, but instead the earth revolved 
upon its axis from west to east, thereby giving us night and 
day. 
Living as he did during an era when science had made no 
worthwhile strides—being without any instruments of preci¬ 
sion whatever—it became necessary that he blaze his own 
pathway in his advance toward the truth he sought. Most 
school children will recall the result of his experiment with a 
pendulum suspended from the overhead ceiling of the leaning 
tower of Pisa, how the pendulum which was not anchored to 
the earth, swerved gradually toward the west as it made its 
way back and forth across the spacious room. 
The writer sees in all this the silent operation of the same 
force which caused the pendulum to veer toward the west in 
its flight. Water, being a non-rigid element, is neither definitely 
anchored to the earth, and the same force which influenced the 
pendulum’s westward movement also exerts a constant pres- 
