// #28. The Yellowstone Park Geysers

THEIR ESSENTIAL FACTS AND CAUSES

I have been to school. Dame Nature is a most kind and skillful teacher. She first put me into the ABC class, and advanced me through conic sections. The first thing in the geyser line she showed me was a mound of rock, large as a small cock of hay, with a projection on top large as a shallow pint bowl turned upside down. In the center of this was a half-inch hole, and from it every two seconds, with a musical chuckle of steam, a handful of diamond drops of water was ejected to a height of from two to five feet. I sat down with it half an hour, compelled to continuous laughter by its own musical cachinnations. There were all the essentials of a geyser. There was a mound, not always existent, built up by deposits from the water supersaturated with mineral. It might be three feet high; it might be thirty. There was the jet of water ejected by subterranean forces. It might be half an inch in diameter; it might be three hundred feet, as in the case of the Excelsior geyser. It might rise six inches; it might rise two hundred and fifty feet. There was the interval between the jets. It might be two seconds; it might be weeks or years.


[Illustration: Formation of the Grotto Geyser.]

A subsequent lesson in my Progressive Geyser Reader was the "Economic." Here was a round basin ten feet in diameter, very shallow, with a hole in the middle about one foot across. The water was perfectly calm. But every six minutes a sudden spurt of water and steam would rise about thirty feet, for thirty seconds, and then settle economically, without waste of water, into the pool, sinking with pulsations as on an elastic cushion a foot below the bottom of the pool. One could stride the opening like a colossus for five and one half minutes without fear. He might be using the calm depth for a mirror. But stay a moment too long and he is scalded to death by the sudden outburst.

The next lesson required more patience and gave more abundant reward. I found a great raised platform on which stood a castellated rock, more than twenty feet square, that had been built up particle by particle into a perfect solid by deposits from the fiery flood. In the center was a brilliant orange-colored throat that went down into the bowels of the earth. That was not the geyser - it was only the trump through which the archangel was to blow. I had heard the preliminary tuning of the instrument.

The guide book said the grand play of this "Castle" geyser began from eight to thirty hours after a previous exhibition, and was preceded by jets of water fifteen to twenty feet high, and that these continued five or six hours before the grand eruption. I hovered near the grand stand till the full thirty hours and the six predictive hours were over, and then, as the thunder above roared threateningly and the rain fell suggestively, I took a rubber coat and camped on the trail of that famous spouter.

Geysers are more than a trifle freaky. "Old Faithful" is a notable exception. Every sixty-five minutes, with almost the regularity of star time, he throws his column of hissing water one hundred and fifty feet high. Others are irregular, sometimes playing every three hours for a few times, and then taking a rest for three or more days. This Castle geyser is not registered to be quiet more than thirty hours, nor to indulge in preparatory spouts for more than six hours. When I finally camped to watch it out all these premonitory symptoms had been duly exhibited. I first carefully noted the frequency and height of the spouts, that any change might foretell the grand finale. There were ten spouts to the minute, and an average height of twenty feet. Hours went by with no hint of a change: ten to the minute, twenty feet in height. People by the dozen came and asked when it would go off. I said, "Liable to go any minute; it is long past due now." Stage loads of tourists, scheduled to run on time, drove up, waited a few minutes, and drove on, as if the grand object of the trip was to make time - not to see the grandeur they had come a thousand miles to enjoy. A photographer set up his camera to catch a shadow of the great display. He stood, sometimes air-bulb in hand, an hour or two, then folded his camera tent and stole away. Five hours had passed and night was near. Everybody was gone. I lay down on the ground to convince myself that I was perfectly patient. I attained so nearly to Nirvana that a little ground squirrel came and ran over me, kissing my hand in a most friendly way.

Six hours of waiting were nearly over when, without a single previous hint of change, one descending spout was met by an ascending one, and a vast column of hissing water rose, with a sound of continuous thunder, one hundred feet in air; and stood there like a pillar of cloud in the desert. The air throbbed as in a cannonade, and the sun brushed away all clouds as if he could not bear to miss a sight he had seen perhaps a million times. Then the top of this upward Niagara bent over like the calyx of a calla, and the downward Niagara covered all that elevated masonry with a rushing cascade. Shifting my position a little, I could see that the sun was thrilling the whole glorious outpour with rainbows. At such times one can neither measure nor express emotions by words. In the thunder which anyone can hear there is always, for all who can receive it, the ineffably sweet voice of the Father saying, "Thou art my beloved son, and all this grand display is for thy precious sake."

In sixteen minutes the flow of waters ceased, and a rush of saturated steam succeeded. At the same time the fierce swish of ascending waters and of descending cascades ceased, and a clear, definite note, as of a trumpet, exceeding long and loud, was blown. No archangel could have done better. As the steam rolled skyward it was condensed, and a very heavy rain fell on about an acre at the east as it was drifted by the air. It looked more like lines of water than separated drops. I found it thoroughly cooled by its flight in the upper air.

I climbed the huge natural masonry, and stood on the top. I could have put my hand into the hot rushing of measureless power. What a sight it was! There were the brilliant colors of the throat, open, three feet wide, and the dazzling whiteness of the steam. At thirty-two minutes from the beginning the steam suddenly became drier, like that close to the spout of a kettle, or close to the whistle of an engine. All pure steam is invisible. At the same time the note of the trumpet distinctly changed. The heavy rain at the east as suddenly stopped. The air could absorb the present amount of moisture. One could see farther down the terrible throat that seemed about to be rent asunder. The awful grandeur was becoming too much for human endurance. The contorted forms of rocks on the summit began to take the forms and heads of dragons, such as the Chinese carve on their monuments. The awful column began to change its effect from terror to fascination, and I knew how Empedocles felt when he flung himself into the burning Aetna. It was time to get down and stand further off.


[Illustration: Bee-Hive Geyser.]

The long waiting had been rewarded. "To patient faith the prize is sure." The grand tumult began to subside. It was beyond all my expectations. Nature never disappoints, for she is of God and in her He yet immanently abides. The next day the sky and all the air were full of falling rain. How could it be otherwise? It was the geyser returning to earth. I sought the place. The awful trumpet was silent, and the steam exhaled as gently as a sleeping baby's breath.

Only one more lesson will be recited at present. I had just arrived in camp when they told me that the Splendid geyser, after two days of quiet, was showing signs of uneasiness. I immediately went out to study my lesson. There was a little hill of very gentle slopes, a little pool at the top, three holes at the west side of it, with a dozen sputtering hot springs scattered about, while in a direct line at the east, within one hundred and forty feet, were the Comet, the Daisy, and another geyser. The Daisy was a beauty, playing forty feet high every two or four hours. All the slopes were constantly flowing with hot water. This general survey was no sooner taken than our glorious Splendid began to play. The roaring column, tinted with the sunset glories, gradually climbed to a height of two hundred feet, leaned a little to the southeast, and bent like a glorious arch of triumph to the earth, almost as solid on its descending as on its ascending side. No wonder it is named "Splendid."

Whoever has studied waterfalls of great height - I have seen nearly forty justly famous falls - has noticed that when a column or mass of water makes the fearful plunge smaller masses of water are constantly feathered off at the sides and delayed by the resistance of the air, while the central mass hurries downward by its concentrated weight. The general appearance is that of numerous spearheads with serrated edges, feathered with light, thrust from some celestial armory into the writhing pool of agonized waters below. In the geyser one gets this effect both in the ascending and in the descending flood. Four times that first night dear old Splendid lured me from my bed to watch her Titanic play in the full light of the moon. During all this time not a hot spring ceased its boiling, nor a smaller geyser its wondrous play, for this gigantic outburst of power that might well have absorbed every energy for a mile around. Obviously they have no connection. Then my beloved Splendid settled into a three-days' rest.

These are the essential facts of geyser display. There are very many variations of performance in every respect, I have seen over twenty geysers in almost jocular, and certainly in overwhelmingly magnificent, activity.

"To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language."


WHAT ARE THE CAUSES?

What is the power that can throw a stream of water two by six feet over the tops of the highest skyscrapers of Chicago? It is heat manifested in the expansive power of steam. Scientists have theorized long and experimented patiently to read the open book of this tremendous manifestation of uncontrollable energy. At first the form and action of a teakettle was supposed to be explanatory. Everyone knows that when steam accumulates under the lid it forces a gentle stream of water from the higher nozzle. This fact was made the basis of a theory to account for geysers by Sir George Mackenzie in 1811. But to suppose that nature has gone into the teakettle manufacturing business to the extent of thirty such kettles in a space of four square miles was seen to be preposterous. So the construction theory was given up.

But suppose a tube (how it is made will be explained later), large or small, regular or irregular, to extend far into the earth, near or through any great source of heat resulting from condensation, combustion, chemical action, or central fire. Now suppose this tube to be filled with water from surface or subterranean sources. Heat converts water, under the pressure of one atmosphere, or fifteen pounds to the square inch, into steam at a temperature of two hundred and twelve degrees. But under greater pressure more heat is required to make steam. The water never leaps and bubbles in an engine boiler. The awful pressure compels it to be quiet. A cubic inch of water will make a cubic foot - one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight times as much - of steam under the pressure of one atmosphere. But under the pressure of a column of water one thousand feet high, giving a pressure of four hundred and thirty-two pounds to the square inch at the bottom, water becomes steam, if at all, only by great heat. Every engineer knows that the pressure exerted by steam increases by great geometrical ratios as the heat increases by small arithmetical ratios. Steam made by two hundred and twelve degrees exerts a pressure, as we have said, of fifteen pounds.

To simply double the two hundred and twelve degrees of heat increases the steam pressure twenty-three times.

Now suppose the subterranean tube or lake of Old Faithful to be freshly filled with its million gallons of water. Sufficient heat makes steam under any pressure. It rises up the tube and is condensed to water again by the colder water above. Hence no commotion. But the whole volume of water grows hotter for an hour. When it is too hot to absorb the steam, and the tube is too narrow to let the amount made bubble up through the water, it lifts the whole mass with a sudden jerk. The instant the pressure of the water is taken off in any degree, the water below, that was kept water by the pressure, breaks into steam most voluminously, and the measureless power floods the earth and sky with water and steam.

It is also known that superheated steam suddenly takes on such great power that no boiler can hold it. Once let the water in a boiler get very low and no boiler can hold the force of the resultant superheated steam. The same heat that, applied to water, gives perfect safety, applied to steam gives utter destruction. Hence the amazing force of the vast jets of the geyser that follow the first spurts.

As soon as the steam is blown off the subterranean waterworks fill the tube and the process is repeated.

This modus operandi was first proposed as a theory by Bunsen in 1846, and later was demonstrated by the artificial geyser of Professor J. H. J. Muller, of Freiburg.


[Illustration: Pulpit Terrace and Bunsen Peak.]


MOUNTS OF MINERAL DEPOSITS

I have the extremely difficult task of representing emotions by words - glories of color and form seen by the eye by symbols meant to be addressed to the ear. Before seeking to describe the diverse colors made largely by one substance, let us remember that while silica, the principal part of these water-built mounds, is one of the three parts of granite, namely, the white crystal quartz, it is also the substance of the beautifully variegated jasper, the lapis lazuli, the green malachite, and the opal, with its cloudy milk-whiteness through which flashes its heart of fire. Silica and alumina combine to make common clay, but alumina forms itself into the red ruby, the golden-tinted topaz, the violet oriental amethyst, the red, white, yellow, and violet sapphire, and the beautiful green emerald. With substances of such rare capabilities we may expect rich results in color and form.

We turn now to deposits from water of these two substances, especially the first. About the Old Faithful geyser is a mound about one hundred and forty-five feet broad at the base, twelve feet high, jeweled over with pools of beauty of every shape, beaded and fretted with glories of color never seen before except in the sky. How were they made?

Water is a general solvent. It can take into its substance several similar bulks of other substances without greatly increasing its own, some actually diminishing it. Hot alkaline water will dissolve even silica rock. When water is saturated with sugar, salt, or other substance, if a little or much water is evaporated some of the saturating substance must be deposited as a solid. All crystals, as quartz or diamonds, have been made by deposits from water. Hot water can hold in solution much more of a solid than cold water. Therefore, when hot water comes out of the earth and is cooled, some of the saturating substance must be deposited as a solid. It is done in various ways, especially two.

Suppose a little pool with perpendicular sides, say twenty feet across. It leaps and boils two feet high. It deposits nothing till the water comes to the cooling edge. Then it builds up a wall where it overflows, and wherever it flows it builds. The result is that you walk up the gentle slopes of a broad flat cone, and find the little lakelet in a gorgeous setting, perfectly full at every point of the circumference. If there is but little overflow, the result may be to deposit all the matter where it first cools, and make a perpendicular wall around the cup two or ten feet high. If the overflow is too much to be cooled at once, the deposit may still be made fifty or one hundred feet from the point of issue. If the overflow is sufficient, it may be building up every inch of a vast cone at once, every foot being wet.


[Illustration: The Punch Bowl, Yellowstone Geysers.]

Many minerals are held in solution and are deposited at various stages of evaporation. Let us suppose the lake to have the bottom sloping toward the abysmal center; the different minerals will be assorted as if with a sieve. At the Sunlight Basin the edge is as flaming red as one ever sees in the sunlit sky. And every color ever seen in a sunset flames almost as brilliantly in the varying depths. Suppose a low cone to be flooded only occasionally, as in the case of the Old Faithful geyser. The cooled water falling from the upper air builds up, under the terrible drench of the cataract, walls three or four inches high, making pools of every conceivable shape, a few inches deep, in which are the most exquisite and varied colors ever seen by mortal eye. You walk about on these dividing walls and gaze into the beaded and impearled pools of a hundred shades of different colors, never equaled except by that perpetual glory of the sunset.

Consider the case of a pool that does not overflow. Just as lakes that have no outlet must grow more and more salt till some have become solid salt beds, so must this pool, tossing its hot waves two or three feet high, evaporate its water and deposit its solids. Where? First, against the cooler sides of the rock under the water, tending to reduce the opening to a mere throat. Second, each wavelet tossed in air is cooled, and deposits on the edge, solid as quartz, a crust that overhangs the pool and tends to close it over as with hot ice. It may build thus a mound fifteen feet high with an open throat in the middle. Thus the pool has constructed an intermittent geyser. If the water supply continues, it also destroys itself. The throat closes up by its own deposits. It is a case of geyseral membranous croup.

I exceedingly longed to try vivisection on a geyser, or at least take one of half a hundred, drain it off, and make a post-mortem examination. On my very last day I found opportunity. I found a dead geyser, though not by any means yet cold. It was still so hot that people had given it an infernal name. I squeezed myself down through its hot throat, which seemed a veritable open sepulcher, and found a cave about twenty-five feet deep, twelve feet wide, and about sixty feet long. It was elliptical in form, the sides coming together at a sharp angle at the ends, bottom, and top. The way down to the fiery heart of the earth had simply grown up by deposits of silex on the sides and at the bottom. The water had evaporated by the intense heat, and I was in the hot hollow that had once held an earthquake and volcano. When I squeezed up to the blessed upper air I was glad there was no help from below.

I could tell of mounds that grew so fast as to inclose the limbs of a tree, making the firmest kind of a ladder by which I climbed to the top; of floods that overflowed acres of forest, leaving every tree firmly planted in solid rock; of mounds hundreds of feet high, covering twenty acres with forms of indescribable beauty - but I despair. The half has not been told. It cannot be. Great and marvelous are all Your works, Lord God Almighty! In wisdom have You made them all.

Emerson says: "Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify." Using these faculties and not mere eyesight, one must surely say: "Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations not only surpasses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are."

// #27. The Grand Canon of the Colorado River

Before me lies a thin bit of red rock, rippled as delicately as a woman's hair, bearing marks of raindrops that came from the south. It was once soft clay. It was laid down close to the igneous Archaean rocks when Mother Earth was in her girlhood and water first began to flow. More clay flowed over, and all was hardened into rock. Many strata, variously colored and composed, were deposited, till our bit of beauty was buried thousands of feet deep. The strata were tilted variously and abraded wondrously, for our earth has been treated very much as the fair-armed bread-maker treats the lump of dough she doubles and kneads on the molding board. Other rocks of a much harder nature, composed in part of the shells of inexpressible multitudes of Ocean's infusoria, were laid down from the superincumbent sea. Still the delicate ripple marks were preserved. Nature's vast library was being formed, and on this scrap of a leaf not a letter was lost.

Beside this stone now lies another of the purest white. It once flowed as water impregnated with lime, and clung to the lower side of a rock now as high above the sea as many a famous mountain. The water gradually evaporated, and the lime still hung like tiny drops. Between the two stones now so near together was once a perpendicular distance of more than a mile of impenetrable rock. How did they ever get together? Let us see.

After the rock making, by the deposit of clay, limestone, etc., this vast plain was lifted seven thousand feet above the sea and rimmed round with mountains. Perhaps in being afterward volcanically tossed in one of this old world's spasms an irregular crack ripped its way along a few hundred miles. Into this crack rushed a great river, perhaps also an inland ocean or vast Lake Superior, of which Salt Lake may be a little remnant puddle. These tumultuous waters proceeded to pulverize, dissolve, and carry away these six thousand feet of rock deposited between the two stones. There was fall enough to make forty Niagaras.

I was once where a deluge of rain had fallen a few days before in a mountain valley. It tore loose some huge rocks and plunged down a precipice of one thousand feet. The rock at the bottom was crushed under the frightful weight of the tumbling superincumbent mass, and every few minutes the top became the bottom. In one hour millions of tons of rock were crushed to pebbles and spread for miles over the plain, filling up a whole village to the roofs of the houses. I knew three villages utterly destroyed by a rush of water only ten feet deep. Water and gravitation make a frightful plow. Here some prehistoric Mississippi turned its mighty furrows.

The Colorado River is one of our great rivers. It is over two thousand miles long, reaches from near our northern to beyond our southern border, and drains three hundred thousand square miles of the west side of the Rocky Mountains. Great as it remains, it is a mere thread to what it once was. It is easy to see that there were several epochs of work. Suppose the first one took off the upper limestone rock to the depth of several thousand feet. This cutting is of various widths. Just here it is eighteen miles wide; but as such rocks are of varying hardness there are many promontories that distinctly project out, say, half a mile from the general rim line, and rising in the center are various Catskill and Holyoke mountains, with defiantly perpendicular sides, that persisted in resisting the mighty rush of waters. The outer portions of their foundations were cut away by the mighty flood and, as the ages went by, occasionally the sides thundered into the chasm, leaving the wall positively perpendicular.

We may now suppose the ocean waters nearly exhausted and only the mighty rivers that had made that ocean were left to flow; indeed, the rising Sierras of some range unknown at the present may have shut off whole oceans of rain. The rivers that remained began to cut a much narrower channel into the softer sand and clay-rock below. From the great mountain-rimmed plateau rivers poured in at the sides, cutting lateral cañons down to the central flow. Between these stand the little Holyokes aforesaid, with greatly narrowed base.

I go down with most reverent awe and pick the little ripple-rain-marked leaf out of its place in the book of nature, a veritable table of stone written by the finger of God, and bring it up and lay it alongside of one formed, eons after, at the top. They be brothers both, formed by the same forces and for the same end.

Standing by this stupendous work of nature day after day, I try to stretch my mind to some large computation of the work done. A whole day is taken to go down the gorge to the river. It takes seven miles of zigzag trail, sometimes frightfully steep, along shelves not over two feet wide, under rock thousands of feet above and going down thousands of feet below, to get down that perpendicular mile. It was an immense day's work.

The day was full of perceptions of the grandeur of vast rock masses never before suggested, except by the mighty mass of the Matterhorn seen close by from its Hörnli shoulder.

There was the river - a regular freight train, running day and night, the track unincumbered with returning cars (they were returned by the elevated road of the upper air) - burdened with dissolved rock and earth.

A slip into this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles into the Gulf.

In the side cañon down which we worked our sublime and toilful way it was easy to see the work done. Sometimes the fierce torrent would pile the bottom of a side cañon with every variety of stone, from the wall a mile high, into one tremendous heap of conglomerate. The next rush of waters would tear a channel through this and pour millions of tons into the main river. For years Boston toiled, in feeble imitation of Milton's angels, to bring the Milton Hills into the back Bay and South Boston Flats. Boston made more land than the city originally contained, but it did not move a teaspoonful compared with these excavations.

The section traversed that day seemed while we were in it like a mighty chasm, a world half rent asunder, full of vast sublimities, but the next day, seen from the rim as a part of the mighty whole, it appeared comparatively little. One gets new meanings of the words almighty, eternity, infinity, in the presence of things done that seem to require them all.

In 1869 Major J. W. Powell, aided by nine men, attempted to pass down this tumultuous river with four boats specially constructed for the purpose. In ninety-eight days he had made one thousand miles, much of it in extremest peril. For weeks there was no possibility of climbing to the plateau above.

Any great scene in nature is like the woman you fall in love with at first sight for some pose of head, queenly carriage, auroral flush of color, penetrative music of voice, or a glance of soul through its illumined windows. You do not know much about her, but in long years of heroic endurance of trials, in the great dignity of motherhood, in the unspeakable comfortings that are scarcely short of godlike, and in the supernal, ineffable beauty and loveliness that cover it all, you find a richness and worth of which the most ardent lover never dreamed. The first sight of the cañon often brings strong men to their knees in awe and adoration. The gorge at Niagara is one hundred and fifty feet deep; it is far short of this, which is six thousand six hundred and forty. Great is the first impression, but in the longer and closer acquaintance every sense of beauty is flooded to the utmost.

The next morning I was out before "jocund day stood tiptoe on the breezy mountain tops." I have seen many sunrises In this world and one other: I have watched the moon slowly rolling its deep valleys for weeks into its morning sunlight. I knew what to expect. But nature always surpasses expectations. The sinuosities of the rim sent back their various colors. A hundred domes and spires, wind sculptured and water sculptured, reached up like Memnon to catch the first light of the sun, and seemed to me to break out into Memnonian music. As the world rolled the steady light penetrated deeper, shadows diminished, light spaces broadened and multiplied, till it seemed as if a new creation were veritably going forward and a new "Let there be light" had been uttered. I had seen it for the first time the night before in the mellow light of a nearly full moon, but the sunlight really seemed to make, in respect to breadth, depth, and definiteness, a new creation.

One peculiar effect I never noticed elsewhere. It is well known that the blue sky is not blue and there is no sky. Blue is the color of the atmosphere, and when seen in the miles deep overhead, or condensed in a jar, it shows its own true color. So, looking into this inconceivable cañon, the true color came out most beauteously. There was a background of red and yellowish rocks. These made the cold blue blush with warm color. The sapphire was backed with sardonyx, and the bluish white of the chalcedony was half pellucid to the gold chrysolite behind it. God was laying the foundation of His perfect city there, and the light of it seemed fit for the redeemed to walk in, and to have been made by the luminousness of Him who is light.

One great purpose of this world is its use as significant symbol and hint of the world to come. The communication of ideas and feelings there is not by slow, clumsy speech, often misunderstood, originally made to express low physical wants, but it is by charade, panorama, parable, and music rolling like the voice of many waters in a storm. The greatest things and relations of earth are as hintful of greater things as a bit of float ore in the plains is suggestive of boundless mines in the upper hills. So the joy of finding one lost lamb in the wilderness tells of the joy of finding and saving a human soul. One should never go to any of God's great wonders to see sights, but to live life; to read in them the figures, symbols, and types of the more wonderful things in the new heavens and the new earth.

The old Hebrew prophets and poets saw God everywhere in nature. The floods clap their hands and the hills are joyful together before the Lord. Miss Proctor, in the Yosemite, caught the same lofty spirit, and sang:

"Perpetual masses here intone,
Uncounted censers swing,
A psalm on every breeze is blown;
The echoing peaks from throne to throne
Greet the indwelling King;
The Lord, the Lord is everywhere,
And seraph-tongued are earth and air."

// #26. The Matterhorn

The Matterhorn is peculiar. I do not know of another mountain like it on the earth. There are such splintered and precipitous spires on the moon. How it came to be such I treated of fully in Sights and Insights. It is approximately a three-sided mountain, fourteen thousand seven hundred and eighteen feet high, whose sides are so steep as to be unassailable. Approach can be made only along the angle at the junction of the planes.


[Illustration: The Matterhorn.]

It was long supposed to be inaccessible. Assault after assault was made on it by the best and most ambitious Alp climbers, but it kept its virgin height untrodden. However, in 1864, seven men, almost unexpectedly, achieved the victory; but in descending four of them were precipitated, down an almost perpendicular declivity, four thousand feet. They had achieved the summit after hundreds of others had failed. They had reveled in the upper glories, deposited proof of their visit, and started to return. According to law, they were roped together. According to custom, in a difficult place all remain still, holding the rope, except one who carefully moves on. Croz, the first guide, was reaching up to take the feet of Mr. Haddow and help him down to where he stood. Suddenly Haddow's strength failed, or he slipped and struck Croz on the shoulders, knocking him off his narrow footing. They two immediately jerked off Rev. Mr. Hudson. The three falling jerked off Lord Francis Douglas. Four were loose and falling; only three left on the rocks. Just then the rope somehow parted, and all four dropped that great fraction of a mile. The mountain climber makes a sad pilgrimage to the graves of three of them in Zermatt; the fourth probably fell in a crevasse of the glacier at the foot, and may be brought to the sight of friends in perhaps two score years, when the river of ice shall have moved down into the valleys where the sun has power to melt away the ice. This accident gave the mountain a reputation for danger to which an occasional death on it since has added.

Each of these later unfortunate occurrences is attributable to personal perversity or deficiency. Peril depends more on the man than on circumstances. One is in danger on a wall twenty feet high, another safe on a precipice of a thousand feet. No man has a right to peril his life in mere mountain climbing; that great sacrifice must be reserved for saving others, or for establishing moral principle.

The morning after coming from Monte Rosa myself and son left Zermatt at half past seven for the top of the Matterhorn, twelve hours distant, under the guidance of Peter Knubel, his brother, and Peter Truffer, three of the best guides for this work in the country. In an hour the dwellings of the mountain-loving people are left behind, the tree limit is passed soon after, the grass cheers us for three hours, when we enter on the wide desolation of the moraines. Here is a little chapel. I entered it as reverently and prayed as earnestly for God's will, not mine, to be done as I ever did in my life, and I am confident that amid the unutterable grandeur that succeeded I felt his presence and help as fully as at any other time.

At ten minutes of two we were roped together and feeling our way carefully in the cut steps on a glacier so steep that, standing erect, one could put his hand upon it. We were on this nearly an hour. Just as we left it for the rocks a great noise above, and a little to the south, attracted attention. A vast mass of stone had detached itself from the overhanging cliff at the top, and falling on the steep slope had broken into a hundred pieces. These went bounding down the side in long leaps. Wherever one struck a cloud of powdered stone leaped into the air, till the whole mountain side smoked and thundered with the grand cannonade. The omen augured to me that the mountain was going to do its best for our reception and entertainment. Fortunately these rock avalanches occur on the steep, unapproachable sides, and not at the angle where men climb.

How the mountain grew upon us as we clung to its sides! When the great objects below had changed to littleness the heights above seemed greater than ever. At half past four we came to a perpendicular height of twenty feet, with a slight slope above. Down this precipice hung a rope; there was also an occasional projection of an inch or two of stone for the mailed foot. At the top, on a little shelf, under hundreds of feet of overhanging rock, some stones had been built round and over a little space for passing the night. The rude cabin occupied all the width of the shelf, so that passing to its other end there was not room to walk without holding on by one's hands in the crevices of the wall. We were now at home; had taken nine hours to do what could be done in eight. What an eyrie in which to sleep! Below us was a sheer descent, of a thousand or two feet, to the glacier. Above us towered the crest of the mountain, seemingly higher than ever. The sharp shadow of the lofty pyramid lengthened toward Monte Rosa. Italy lifted up its mountains tipped with sunshine to cheer us. The Obernese Alps, beyond the Rhone, answered with numerous torches to light us to our sleep. According to prearrangement, at eight o'clock we kindled a light on our crag to tell our friends in Zermatt that we had accomplished the first stage of our journey. They answered instantly with a cheery blaze, and we lay down to sleep.

When four of us lay together I was so crowded against the wall that I thought if it should give way I could fall two thousand feet out of bed without possibility of stopping on the way. The ice was two feet thick on the floor, and by reason of the scarcity of bedding I was reminded of the damp, chilly sheets of some unaired guest-chambers. I do not think I slept a moment, but I passed the night in a most happy, thoughtful, and exultant frame of mind.

At half past three in the morning we were roped together - fifteen feet of rope between each two men - for the final three or four hours' work. It is everywhere steep; it is every minute hands and feet on the rocks; sometimes you cling with fingers, elbows, knees, and feet, and are tempted to add the nose and chin. Where it is least steep the guide's heels are right in your face; when it is precipitous you only see a line of rope before you. We make the final pause an hour before the top. Here every weight and the fear that so easily besets one must be laid aside. No part of the way has seemed so difficult; not even that just past--when we rounded a shoulder on the ice for sixty feet, sometimes not over twenty inches wide, on the verge of a precipice four thousand feet high. To this day I can see the wrinkled form of that far-down glacier below, though I took care not to make more than one glance at it.

The rocks become smoother and steeper, if possible. A chain or rope trails from above in four places. You have good hope that it is well secured, and wish you were lighter, as you go up hand over hand. Then a beautiful slope for hands, knees, and feet for half an hour, and the top is reached at half past six.

The view is sublime. Moses on Pisgah could have had no such vision. He had knowledge added of the future grandeur of his people, but such a revelation as this tells so clearly what God can do for his people hereafter that that element of Moses's enjoyment can be perceived, if not fully appreciated. All the well-known mountains stand up like friends to cheer us. Mont Blanc has the smile of the morning sun to greet us withal. Monte Rosa chides us for not partaking of her prepared visions. The kingdoms of the world - France, Switzerland, Italy - are at our feet. One hundred and twenty snow-peaks flame like huge altar piles in the morning sun. The exhilarant air gives ecstasy to body, the new visions intensity of feeling to soul. The Old World has sunk out of sight. This is Mount Zion, the city of God. New Jerusalem has come down out of heaven adorned as a bride for her husband. The pavements are like glass mingled with fire. The gates of the morning are pearl. The walls, near or far according to your thought, are like jasper and sapphire. The glory of God and of the Lamb lightens it.

But we must descend, though it is good to be here. It is even more difficult and tedious than the ascent. Non facilis descensus. With your face to the mountain you have only the present surface and the effort for that instant. But when you turn your back on the mountain the imminent danger appears. It is not merely ahead, but the sides are much more dangerous. On the way down we had more cannonades. In six hours we were off the cliffs, and by half past three we had let ourselves down, inch by inch, to Zermatt, a distance of nine thousand four hundred feet.

Looking up to the Matterhorn this next morning after the climb, I feel for it a personal affection. It has put more pictures of grandeur into my being than ever entered in such a way before. It is grand enough to bear acquaintance. People who view it from a distance must be strangers. It has been, and ever will be, a great example and lofty monument of my Father's power. He takes up the isles as a very little thing; He touches the mountains and they smoke. The strength of the hills is His also; and He has made all things for His children, and waits to do greater things than these.

// #25. The Monte Rosa

Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of thought and endeavor in Europe. We are occasionally surprised by hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere, and we wonder why they went there. The Alps are a great object of interest to all Europe. I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478 works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller. It seems incredible. In this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology, botany, and one volume of Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont Blanc. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends folded over.

It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for bugs. Every rod is a schoolhouse. They speak of the "snow mountains" with ardent affection. Every Englishman, having no mountains at home, speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps. He, however, cares less for their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability. The name of every mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand testimonial of his ability at home.

There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy. In the grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of the most interesting exhibits. This general interest in the Alps is a testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach, and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the enervating influences of civilization. There is one place in the world devoted by divine decree to pure air. You are obliged to use it. Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect air. Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done. He crawled out of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that time. In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge, training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work, man does well to be interested.

You want to ascend these mountains? Come to Zermatt. With a wand ten miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks. Europe has but one higher. Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your house - only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the house. This takes three hours - an hour to each hundred stories; after the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the Görner Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the glorious revelations of the morrow.

The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good for your pluck! Bon voyage, gute reise," and went to bed. In an hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier. The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long, was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was clouded, and so were we. Soon it came out again, and continued clear. But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his servants.

Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain. Six hours and a half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight. I have no fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do the ascents. They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and enjoy, but to boast. We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow of ice below. We scramble up the rocks of the mountain. Hour after hour we toil upward. At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all four roped together. There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them. If a man drops in the rest must pull him out. Being heavier than any other man of the party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay of dangling by a rope in a chasm. The beauty of these cold blue ice vaults cannot be described. They are often fringed with icicles. In one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an apparently reversed condition. We passed one place where vast masses of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start a new avalanche. We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops.

How the view widened! How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened the effect in the valley below! The glorious air made us know what the man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive. Some have little occasion to be thankful in that respect.

Here we learned the use of a guide. Having carefully chosen him, by testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only generally, but step by step. Put each foot in his track. He had trodden the snow to firmness. But being heavier than he it often gave way under my pressure. One such slump and recovery takes more strength than ten regular steps. Not so in following the Guide to the fairer and greater heights of the next world. He who carried this world and its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever breaks down the track. And just so in that upward way, one fall and recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps.

Meanwhile, what of the weather? Uncertainty. Avalanches thundered from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in the air. The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm. Still the sun shone clear. We had put in six of the eight hours' work of ascent when snow began to fall. Soon it was too thick to see far. We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm. It was only twenty feet wide. Getting round this the storm deepened till we could scarcely see one another. There was no mountain, no sky. We halted of necessity. The guide said, "Go back." I said, "Wait." We waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which we had come - our only guide back if the storm continued - was lost except the holes made by the Alpenstocks. The snow drifted over, and did not fill these so quickly.

Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down. In an hour we got below the storm. The valley into which we looked was full of brightest sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk. In another hour the whole sky was perfectly clear. Oh, that I had kept my faith in my aneroid! Had I held to the faith that started me in the morning - endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied apparent knowledge of local guides - and then been able to surmount the difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the cleared air. Better things were prepared for me than I knew; indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of darkness and storm.

I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and softened snow, and said to the guide, "Tomorrow I start for the Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to Zermatt.

Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination, has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.

// #24. Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

We are a fighting race; not because we enjoy fights, but we enjoy the exercise of force. In early times when we knew of no forces to handle but our own, and no object to exercise them on but our fellow-men, there were feuds, tyrannies, wars, and general desolation. In the Thirty Years' War the population of Germany was starved and murdered down from sixteen millions to less than five millions.

But since we have found field, room, and ample verge for the play of our forces in material realms, and have acquired mastery of the superb forces of nature, we have come to an era of peace. We can now use our forces and those of nature with as real a sense of dominion and mastery on material things, resulting in comfort, as formerly on our fellow-men, resulting in ruin. We now devote to the conquest of nature what we once devoted to the conquest of men. There is a fascination in looking on force and its results. Some men never stand in the presence of an engine in full play without a feeling of reverence, as if they stood in the presence of God - and they do.

The turning to these forces is a characteristic of our age that makes it an age of adventure and discovery. The heart of equatorial Africa has been explored, and soon the poles will hold no undiscovered secrets.

Among the great monuments of power the mountains stand supreme. All the cohesions, chemical affinities, affections of metals, liquids, and gases are in full play, and the measureless power of gravitation. And yet higher forces have chasmed, veined, infiltrated, disintegrated, molded, bent the rocky strata like sheets of paper, and lifted the whole mass miles in air as if it were a mere bubble of gas.

The study of these powers is one of the fascinations of our time. Let me ask you to enjoy with me several of the greatest manifestations of force on this world of ours.

The Monte Rosa

Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of thought and endeavor in Europe. We are occasionally surprised by hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere, and we wonder why they went there. The Alps are a great object of interest to all Europe. I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478 works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller. It seems incredible. In this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology, botany, and one volume of Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont Blanc. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends folded over.

It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for bugs. Every rod is a schoolhouse. They speak of the "snow mountains" with ardent affection. Every Englishman, having no mountains at home, speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps. He, however, cares less for their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability. The name of every mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand testimonial of his ability at home.

There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy. In the grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of the most interesting exhibits. This general interest in the Alps is a testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach, and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the enervating influences of civilization. There is one place in the world devoted by divine decree to pure air. You are obliged to use it. Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect air. Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done. He crawled out of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that time. In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge, training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work, man does well to be interested.

You want to ascend these mountains? Come to Zermatt. With a wand ten miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks. Europe has but one higher. Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your house - only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the house. This takes three hours - an hour to each hundred stories; after the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the Görner Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the glorious revelations of the morrow.

The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good for your pluck! Bon voyage, gute reise," and went to bed. In an hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier. The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long, was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was clouded, and so were we. Soon it came out again, and continued clear. But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his servants.

Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain. Six hours and a half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight. I have no fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do the ascents. They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and enjoy, but to boast. We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow of ice below. We scramble up the rocks of the mountain. Hour after hour we toil upward. At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all four roped together. There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them. If a man drops in the rest must pull him out. Being heavier than any other man of the party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay of dangling by a rope in a chasm. The beauty of these cold blue ice vaults cannot be described. They are often fringed with icicles. In one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an apparently reversed condition. We passed one place where vast masses of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start a new avalanche. We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops.

How the view widened! How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened the effect in the valley below! The glorious air made us know what the man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive. Some have little occasion to be thankful in that respect.

Here we learned the use of a guide. Having carefully chosen him, by testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only generally, but step by step. Put each foot in his track. He had trodden the snow to firmness. But being heavier than he it often gave way under my pressure. One such slump and recovery takes more strength than ten regular steps. Not so in following the Guide to the fairer and greater heights of the next world. He who carried this world and its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever breaks down the track. And just so in that upward way, one fall and recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps.

Meanwhile, what of the weather? Uncertainty. Avalanches thundered from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in the air. The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm. Still the sun shone clear. We had put in six of the eight hours' work of ascent when snow began to fall. Soon it was too thick to see far. We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm. It was only twenty feet wide. Getting round this the storm deepened till we could scarcely see one another. There was no mountain, no sky. We halted of necessity. The guide said, "Go back." I said, "Wait." We waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which we had come - our only guide back if the storm continued - was lost except the holes made by the Alpenstocks. The snow drifted over, and did not fill these so quickly.

Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down. In an hour we got below the storm. The valley into which we looked was full of brightest sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk. In another hour the whole sky was perfectly clear. O that I had kept my faith in my aneroid! Had I held to the faith that started me in the morning - endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied apparent knowledge of local guides - and then been able to surmount the difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the cleared air. Better things were prepared for me than I knew; indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of darkness and storm.

I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and softened snow, and said to the guide, "Tomorrow I start for the Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to Zermatt.

Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination, has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.

// #23. The Next World to Conquer

Man's next realm of conquest is the celestial ether. It has higher powers, greater intensities, and quicker activities than any realm he has yet attempted.

When the emissory or corpuscular theory of light had to be abandoned a medium for light's interplay between worlds had to be conceived. The existence of an all-pervasive medium called the luminiferous ether was launched as a theory. Its reality has been so far demonstrated that but very few doubters remain.

What facts of its conditions and powers can be known? It differs almost totally from our conceptions of matter. Of the eighteen necessary properties of matter perhaps only one, extension, can be predicated of it. It is unlimited, all-pervasive; even where worlds are non-attractive, does not accumulate about suns or other bodies; has no structure, chemical relations, nor inertia; is not heatable, and is not cognizable by any of our present senses. Does it not take us one step toward an apprehension of the revealed condition of spirit?

Recall its actual activities. Two hundred and fifty-eight vibrations of air per second produce on the ear the sensation we call do, or C of the soprano scale; five hundred and sixteen give the upper C, or an octave above. So the sound runs up in air till, above, say, thirty-five thousand vibrations per second, there is plenty of sound inaudible to our ears. But not inaudible to finer ears. To them the morning stars sing together in mighty chorus:

"Forever singing as they shine,
'The hand that made us is divine.'"

Electricity has as great a variety of vibrations as sound. Since some kinds of electricity do not readily pass through space devoid of air, though light and heat do, it seems likely that some of the lower intensities and slower vibrations of electricity are not in ether but in air. Certainly some of the higher intensities are in ether. Between two hundred and four hundred millions of millions of vibrations of ether per second are the different sorts of heat. Between four hundred and eight hundred vibrations are the different colors of light. Beyond eight hundred vibrations there is plenty of light, invisible to our eyes, known as chemical rays and probably the Roentgen rays. Beyond these are there vibrations for thought-transference? Who knoweth?

These familiar facts are called up to show the almost infinite capacities and intensities of the ether. Matter is more forceful, as it is less dense. Rock is solid, and has little force except obstinate resistance. Steam is rarer and more forceful. Gases suddenly born of dynamite touched by fire in the rock under a mountain have the tremendous pressure of eighty thousand pounds to the square inch. Ether is so rare that its density, compared with water, is represented by a decimal fraction with twenty-seven ciphers before it.

When the worlds navigate this sea, do they plow through it as a ship through the waves, forcing them aside, or as a sieve letting the water through it? Doubtless the sieve is the better symbol. Certainly the vibrations flow through solid glass and most solid diamond. To be sure, they are a little hampered by the solid substance. The speed of light is reduced from one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second in space to one hundred and twenty thousand in glass. If ether can so readily go through such solids, no wonder that a spirit body could appear to the disciples, "the doors being shut."

Marvelous discoveries in the capacities of ether have been made lately. In 1842 Joseph Henry found that electric waves in the top of his house provoked action in a wire circuit in the cellar, through two floors and ceilings, without wire connections. More than twenty years ago Professor Loomis, of the United States coast survey, telegraphed twenty miles between mountains by electric impulses sent from kites. Last year Mr. Preece, the cable being broken, sent, without wires, one hundred and fifty-six messages between the mainland and the island of Mull, a distance of four and a half miles. Marconi, an Italian, has sent recognizable signals through seven or eight thick walls of the London post-office, and three fourths of a mile through a hill. Jagadis Chunder Bose, of India, has fired a pistol by an electric vibration seventy-five feet away and through more than four feet of masonry. Since brick does not elastically vibrate to such infinitesimal impulses as electric waves, ether must. It has already been proven that one can telegraph to a flying train from the overhead wires. Ether is a far better medium of transmission than iron. A wire will now carry eight messages each way, at the same time, without interference. What will not the more facile ether do?

Such are some of the first vague suggestions of a realm of power and knowledge not yet explored. They are mere auroral hints of a new dawn. The full day is yet to shine.

Like timid children, we have peered into the schoolhouse - afraid of the unknown master. If we will but enter we shall find that the Master is our Father, and that He has fitted up this house, out of His own infinite wisdom, skill, and love, that we may be like Him in wisdom and power as well as in love.

// #22. Mobility of Seeming Solids

When a human breath, or the white jet of a steam whistle, or the black cough of a locomotive smokestack is projected into the air it is easy to see that the air is mobile. Its particles easily roll over one another in voluminously infolding wreaths. The same is seen in water. The crest of a wave falls over a portion of air, imprisoning it for a moment, and the mingled air and water of different densities prevent the light of the sun or sky from going straight down into the black depths and being lost, but by being reflected and turned back it shows like beautiful white lace, constantly created and dissolved with a thousandfold more beauty than any that ever came from human hands. All the three shifting elements of the swift creations are mobile. This seems to be the case because these elements are not solid. The particles have plenty of room to play about each other, to execute mazy dances and minuets with vastly more space than substance.

Extend the thought a little. Things that seem to us most solid are equally mobile. An iron wire seems solid. It is so; some parts much more so than others. The surface that has been in closest contact with the die as the wire was drawn through, reducing its size by one half, perhaps, is vastly more dense than the inner parts that have not been so condensed. File away one tenth of a wire, taking it all from the surface, and you weaken the tensile strength of the wire one half. But, dense and solid as this iron is, its particles are as mobile within certain limits as the particles of air. An electric message sent through a mile of wire is not anything transmitted; matter is not transferred, but the particles are set to dancing in wavy motion from end to end. Particles are leaping within ordered limits and according to regular laws as really as the clouds swirl and the air trembles into song through the throat of a singer. When a wire is made sensitive by electricity the breath of a child can make it vibrate from end to end, ensouled with the child's laughter or fancies. Nay, more, and far more wonderful, the wire will be sensitive to the number of vibrations of a certain note of music, and no receiver at the other end will gather up its sensitive tremblings unless it is pitched to the keynote of the vibrations sent. In this way eight sets of vibrations have been sent on one wire both ways at the same time, and no set of signals has in any way interfered with the completeness and audibility of the rest. Sixteen sets of waltzes were being performed at one and the same time by the particles of one wire without confusion. Because the air is transmitting the notes of an organ from the loft to the opposite end of the church, it is not incapable of bringing the sound of a voice in an opposite direction to the organist from the other end of the church.

The extreme mobility of steel is seen when the red-hot metal is plunged into water. Instantly every particle takes a new position, making it a hundredfold more hard than before it was heated. But these particles of transferred steel are still mobile. A man's razor does not cut smoothly. It is dull, or has a ragged edge that is more inclined to draw tears than cut hairs. He draws the razor over the tender palm of his hand a few times, rearranges the particles of the edge and builds them out into a sharper form. Then the razor returns to the lip with the dainty touch of a kiss instead of a saw. Or the tearful man dips the razor in hot water and the particles run out to make a wider blade and, of course, a thinner, sharper edge. Drop the tire of a wagon wheel into a circular fire. As the heat increases each particle says to its neighbor, "Please stand a little further off; this more than July heat is uncomfortable." So the close friends stand a little further apart, lengthening the tire an inch or two. Then, being taken out of the fire and put on the wheel and cooled, the particles snuggle up together again, holding the wheel with a grip of cold iron. Mobile and loose, with plenty of room to play, as the particles have, neither wire nor tire loses its tensile strength. They hold together, whether arms are locked around each other's waist, or hand clasps hand in farther reach. What change has come to iron when it has been made red or white hot? Its particles have simply been mobilized. It differs from cold iron as an army in barracks and forts differs from an army mobilized. Nothing has been added but movement. There is no caloric substance. Heat is a mode of motion. The particles of iron have been made to vibrate among themselves. When the rapidity of movement reaches four hundred and sixty millions of millions of vibrations per second it so affects the eye that we say it is red-hot. When other systems of vibration have been added for yellow, etc., up to seven hundred and thirty millions of millions for the violet, and all continue in full play, the eye perceives what we call white heat. It is a simple illustration of the readiness of seeming solids to vibrate with almost infinite swiftness.

I have been to-day in what is to me a kind of heaven below - the workshop of my much-loved friend, John A. Brashear, in Allegheny, Pa. He easily makes and measures things to one four-hundred-thousandth of an inch of accuracy. I put my hand for a few seconds on a great piece of glass three inches thick. The human heat raised a lump detectable by his measurements. We were testing a piece of glass half an inch thick; and five inches in diameter. I put my two thumbnails at the two sides as it rested on its bed, and could see at once that I had compressed the glass to a shorter diameter. We twisted it in so many ways that I said, "That is a piece of glass putty." And yet it was the firmest texture possible to secure. Great lenses are so sensitive that one cannot go near them without throwing them discernibly out of shape. It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable mountains. I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you into so much of his finest thinking." He is a mechanic, not a theologian. This foremost man in the world in his fine department was lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer in a rolling mill.

But for elasticity and mobility nothing approaches the celestial ether. Its vibrations reach into millions of millions per second, and its wave-lengths for extreme red light are only .0000266 of an inch long, and for extreme violet still less - .0000167 of an inch.

It is easier molding hot iron than cold, mobile things than immobile. This world has been made elastic, ready to take new forms. New creations are easy, for man, even - much more so for God. Of angels, Milton says:

"Thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest."

No less is it true of atoms. In him all things live and move. Such intense activities could not be without an infinite God immanent in matter.

// #21. Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms

Ultimate atoms of matter are asserted to be impenetrable. That is, if a mass of them really touched each other, that mass would not be condensible by any force. But atoms of matter do not touch. It is thinkable, but not demonstrable, that condensation might go on till there were no discernible substance left, only force.

Matter exists in three states: solid, liquid, and gas. It is thought that all matter may be passed through the three stages - iron being capable of being volatilized, and gases condensed to liquids and solids - the chief difference of these states being greater or less distance between the constituent atoms and molecules. In gas the particles are distant from each other, like gnats flying in the air; in liquids, distant as men passing in a busy street; in solids, as men in a congregation, so sparse that each can easily move about. The congregation can easily disperse to the rarity of those walking in the street, and the men in the street condense to the density of the congregation. So, matter can change in going from solids to liquids and gases, or vice versa. The behavior of atoms in the process is surpassingly interesting.

Gold changes its density, and therefore its thickness, between the two dies of the mint that make it money. How do the particles behave as they snuggle up closer to each other?

Take a piece of iron wire and bend it. The atoms on the inner side become nearer together, those on the outside farther apart. Twist it. The outer particles revolve on each other; those of the middle do not move. They assume and maintain their new relations.

Hang a weight on a wire. It does not stretch like a rubber thread, but it stretches. Eight wires were tested as to their tensile strength. They gave an average of forty-five pounds, and an elongation averaging nineteen per cent of the total length. Then a wire of the same kind was given time to adjust itself to its new and trying circumstances. Forty pounds were hung on one day, three pounds more the next day, and so on, increasing the weights by diminishing quantities, till in sixty days it carried fifty-seven pounds. So it seems that exercise strengthened the wire nearly twenty-seven per cent.

While those atoms are hustling about, lengthening the wire and getting a better grip on one another, they grow warm with the exercise. Hold a thick rubber band against your lip - suddenly stretch it. The lip easily perceives the greater heat. After a few moments let it contract. The greater coldness is equally perceptible.

A wire suspending thirty-nine pounds being twisted ninety-five full turns lengthened itself one sixteen-hundredth of its length. Being further twisted by twenty-five turns it shortened itself one fourth of its previous elongation. During the twisting some sections took far more torsion than others. A steel wire supporting thirty-nine pounds was twisted one hundred and twenty times and then allowed to untwist at will. It let out only thirty-eight turns and retained eighty-two in the new permanent relation of particles. A wire has been known to accommodate itself to nearly fourteen hundred twists, and still the atoms did not let go of each other. They slid about on each other as freely as the atoms of water, but they still held on. It is easier to conceive of these atoms sliding about, making the wire thinner and longer, when we consider that it is the opinion of our best physicists that molecules made of atoms are never still. Masses of matter may be still, but not the constituent elements. They are always in intensest activity, like a mass of bees - those inside coming out, outside ones going in - but the mass remains the same.

The atoms of water behave extraordinarily. I know of a boiler and pipes for heating a house. When the fire was applied and the temperature was changed from that of the street to two hundred degrees, it was easy to see that there was a whole barrel more of it than when it was let into the boiler. It had been swollen by the heat, but it was nothing but water.

Mobile, flexible, and yielding as water seems to be, it has an obstinacy quite remarkable. It was for a long time supposed to be absolutely incompressible. It is nearly so. A pressure that would reduce air to one hundredth of its bulk would not discernibly affect water. Put a ton weight on a cubic inch of water; it does not flinch nor perceptibly shrink, yet the atoms of water do not fill the space they occupy. They object to being crowded. They make no objection to having other matter come in and possess the space unoccupied by them.

Air so much enjoys its free, agile state, leaping over hills and plains, kissing a thousand flowers, that it greatly objects to being condensed to a liquid. First we must take away all the heat. Two hundred and ten degrees of heat changes water to steam filling 1,728 times as much space. No amount of pressure will condense steam to water unless the heat is removed. So take heat away from air till it is more than two hundred degrees below zero, and then a pressure of about two hundred atmospheres (14.7 pounds each) changes common air to fluid. It fights desperately against condensation, growing hot with the effort, and it maintains its resilience for years at any point of pressure short of the final surrender that gives up to become liquid.

Perhaps sometime we shall have the pure air of the mountains or the sea condensed to fluid and sold by the quart to the dwellers in the city, to be expanded into air once more.

The marvel is not greater that gas is able to sustain itself under the awful pressure with its particles in extreme dispersion, than that what we call solids should have their molecules in a mazy dance and yet keep their strength.

Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations, not only surpasses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are.

// #20. Creations Now in Progress

The forces of creation are yet in full play. Who can direct them? Rewards greater than Tilghman's await the thinker. We are permitted not only to think God's thoughts after him, but to do his works. "Greater works than these that I do shall he do who believeth on me," says the Greatest Worker. Great profit incites to do the work noted below.

Carbon as charcoal is worth about six cents a bushel; as plumbago, for lead pencils or for the bicycle chain, it is worth more; as diamond it has been sold for $500,000 for less than an ounce, and that was regarded as less than half its value. Such a stone is so valuable that $15,000 has been spent in grinding and polishing its surface. The glazier pays $5.00 for a bit of carbon so small that it would take about ten thousand of them to make an ounce.

Why is there such a difference in value? Simply arrangement and compactness. Can we so enormously enhance the value of a bushel of charcoal by arrangement and compression? Not very satisfactorily as yet. We can apply almost limitless pressure, but that does not make diamonds. Every particle must go to its place by some law and force we have not yet attained the mastery of.

We do not know and control the law and force in nature that would enable us to say to a few million bricks, stones, bits of glass, etc., "Fly up through earth, water, and air, and combine into a perfect palace, with walls, buttresses, towers, and windows all in exact architectural harmony." But there is such a law and force for crystals, if not for palaces. There is wisdom to originate and power to manage such a force. It does not take masses of rock and stick them together, nor even particles from a fluid, but atoms from a gas. Atoms as fine as those of air must be taken and put in their place, one by one, under enormous pressure, to have the resulting crystal as compact as a diamond.

The force of crystallization is used by us in many inferior ways, as in making crystals of rock candy, sulphur, salt, etc., but for the making of diamonds it is too much for us, except in a small way.

While we cannot yet use the force that builds large white diamonds we can use the diamonds themselves. Set a number of them around a section of an iron tube, place it against a rock, at the surface or deep down in a mine, cause it to revolve rapidly by machinery, and it will bore into the rock, leaving a core. Force in water, to remove the dust and chips, and the diamond teeth will eat their way hundreds of feet in any direction; and by examining the extracted core miners can tell what sort of ore there is hundreds of feet in advance. Hence, they go only where they know that value lies.

// #28. The Yellowstone Park Geysers

THEIR ESSENTIAL FACTS AND CAUSES

I have been to school. Dame Nature is a most kind and skillful teacher. She first put me into the ABC class, and advanced me through conic sections. The first thing in the geyser line she showed me was a mound of rock, large as a small cock of hay, with a projection on top large as a shallow pint bowl turned upside down. In the center of this was a half-inch hole, and from it every two seconds, with a musical chuckle of steam, a handful of diamond drops of water was ejected to a height of from two to five feet. I sat down with it half an hour, compelled to continuous laughter by its own musical cachinnations. There were all the essentials of a geyser. There was a mound, not always existent, built up by deposits from the water supersaturated with mineral. It might be three feet high; it might be thirty. There was the jet of water ejected by subterranean forces. It might be half an inch in diameter; it might be three hundred feet, as in the case of the Excelsior geyser. It might rise six inches; it might rise two hundred and fifty feet. There was the interval between the jets. It might be two seconds; it might be weeks or years.


[Illustration: Formation of the Grotto Geyser.]

A subsequent lesson in my Progressive Geyser Reader was the "Economic." Here was a round basin ten feet in diameter, very shallow, with a hole in the middle about one foot across. The water was perfectly calm. But every six minutes a sudden spurt of water and steam would rise about thirty feet, for thirty seconds, and then settle economically, without waste of water, into the pool, sinking with pulsations as on an elastic cushion a foot below the bottom of the pool. One could stride the opening like a colossus for five and one half minutes without fear. He might be using the calm depth for a mirror. But stay a moment too long and he is scalded to death by the sudden outburst.

The next lesson required more patience and gave more abundant reward. I found a great raised platform on which stood a castellated rock, more than twenty feet square, that had been built up particle by particle into a perfect solid by deposits from the fiery flood. In the center was a brilliant orange-colored throat that went down into the bowels of the earth. That was not the geyser - it was only the trump through which the archangel was to blow. I had heard the preliminary tuning of the instrument.

The guide book said the grand play of this "Castle" geyser began from eight to thirty hours after a previous exhibition, and was preceded by jets of water fifteen to twenty feet high, and that these continued five or six hours before the grand eruption. I hovered near the grand stand till the full thirty hours and the six predictive hours were over, and then, as the thunder above roared threateningly and the rain fell suggestively, I took a rubber coat and camped on the trail of that famous spouter.

Geysers are more than a trifle freaky. "Old Faithful" is a notable exception. Every sixty-five minutes, with almost the regularity of star time, he throws his column of hissing water one hundred and fifty feet high. Others are irregular, sometimes playing every three hours for a few times, and then taking a rest for three or more days. This Castle geyser is not registered to be quiet more than thirty hours, nor to indulge in preparatory spouts for more than six hours. When I finally camped to watch it out all these premonitory symptoms had been duly exhibited. I first carefully noted the frequency and height of the spouts, that any change might foretell the grand finale. There were ten spouts to the minute, and an average height of twenty feet. Hours went by with no hint of a change: ten to the minute, twenty feet in height. People by the dozen came and asked when it would go off. I said, "Liable to go any minute; it is long past due now." Stage loads of tourists, scheduled to run on time, drove up, waited a few minutes, and drove on, as if the grand object of the trip was to make time - not to see the grandeur they had come a thousand miles to enjoy. A photographer set up his camera to catch a shadow of the great display. He stood, sometimes air-bulb in hand, an hour or two, then folded his camera tent and stole away. Five hours had passed and night was near. Everybody was gone. I lay down on the ground to convince myself that I was perfectly patient. I attained so nearly to Nirvana that a little ground squirrel came and ran over me, kissing my hand in a most friendly way.

Six hours of waiting were nearly over when, without a single previous hint of change, one descending spout was met by an ascending one, and a vast column of hissing water rose, with a sound of continuous thunder, one hundred feet in air; and stood there like a pillar of cloud in the desert. The air throbbed as in a cannonade, and the sun brushed away all clouds as if he could not bear to miss a sight he had seen perhaps a million times. Then the top of this upward Niagara bent over like the calyx of a calla, and the downward Niagara covered all that elevated masonry with a rushing cascade. Shifting my position a little, I could see that the sun was thrilling the whole glorious outpour with rainbows. At such times one can neither measure nor express emotions by words. In the thunder which anyone can hear there is always, for all who can receive it, the ineffably sweet voice of the Father saying, "Thou art my beloved son, and all this grand display is for thy precious sake."

In sixteen minutes the flow of waters ceased, and a rush of saturated steam succeeded. At the same time the fierce swish of ascending waters and of descending cascades ceased, and a clear, definite note, as of a trumpet, exceeding long and loud, was blown. No archangel could have done better. As the steam rolled skyward it was condensed, and a very heavy rain fell on about an acre at the east as it was drifted by the air. It looked more like lines of water than separated drops. I found it thoroughly cooled by its flight in the upper air.

I climbed the huge natural masonry, and stood on the top. I could have put my hand into the hot rushing of measureless power. What a sight it was! There were the brilliant colors of the throat, open, three feet wide, and the dazzling whiteness of the steam. At thirty-two minutes from the beginning the steam suddenly became drier, like that close to the spout of a kettle, or close to the whistle of an engine. All pure steam is invisible. At the same time the note of the trumpet distinctly changed. The heavy rain at the east as suddenly stopped. The air could absorb the present amount of moisture. One could see farther down the terrible throat that seemed about to be rent asunder. The awful grandeur was becoming too much for human endurance. The contorted forms of rocks on the summit began to take the forms and heads of dragons, such as the Chinese carve on their monuments. The awful column began to change its effect from terror to fascination, and I knew how Empedocles felt when he flung himself into the burning Aetna. It was time to get down and stand further off.


[Illustration: Bee-Hive Geyser.]

The long waiting had been rewarded. "To patient faith the prize is sure." The grand tumult began to subside. It was beyond all my expectations. Nature never disappoints, for she is of God and in her He yet immanently abides. The next day the sky and all the air were full of falling rain. How could it be otherwise? It was the geyser returning to earth. I sought the place. The awful trumpet was silent, and the steam exhaled as gently as a sleeping baby's breath.

Only one more lesson will be recited at present. I had just arrived in camp when they told me that the Splendid geyser, after two days of quiet, was showing signs of uneasiness. I immediately went out to study my lesson. There was a little hill of very gentle slopes, a little pool at the top, three holes at the west side of it, with a dozen sputtering hot springs scattered about, while in a direct line at the east, within one hundred and forty feet, were the Comet, the Daisy, and another geyser. The Daisy was a beauty, playing forty feet high every two or four hours. All the slopes were constantly flowing with hot water. This general survey was no sooner taken than our glorious Splendid began to play. The roaring column, tinted with the sunset glories, gradually climbed to a height of two hundred feet, leaned a little to the southeast, and bent like a glorious arch of triumph to the earth, almost as solid on its descending as on its ascending side. No wonder it is named "Splendid."

Whoever has studied waterfalls of great height - I have seen nearly forty justly famous falls - has noticed that when a column or mass of water makes the fearful plunge smaller masses of water are constantly feathered off at the sides and delayed by the resistance of the air, while the central mass hurries downward by its concentrated weight. The general appearance is that of numerous spearheads with serrated edges, feathered with light, thrust from some celestial armory into the writhing pool of agonized waters below. In the geyser one gets this effect both in the ascending and in the descending flood. Four times that first night dear old Splendid lured me from my bed to watch her Titanic play in the full light of the moon. During all this time not a hot spring ceased its boiling, nor a smaller geyser its wondrous play, for this gigantic outburst of power that might well have absorbed every energy for a mile around. Obviously they have no connection. Then my beloved Splendid settled into a three-days' rest.

These are the essential facts of geyser display. There are very many variations of performance in every respect, I have seen over twenty geysers in almost jocular, and certainly in overwhelmingly magnificent, activity.

"To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language."


WHAT ARE THE CAUSES?

What is the power that can throw a stream of water two by six feet over the tops of the highest skyscrapers of Chicago? It is heat manifested in the expansive power of steam. Scientists have theorized long and experimented patiently to read the open book of this tremendous manifestation of uncontrollable energy. At first the form and action of a teakettle was supposed to be explanatory. Everyone knows that when steam accumulates under the lid it forces a gentle stream of water from the higher nozzle. This fact was made the basis of a theory to account for geysers by Sir George Mackenzie in 1811. But to suppose that nature has gone into the teakettle manufacturing business to the extent of thirty such kettles in a space of four square miles was seen to be preposterous. So the construction theory was given up.

But suppose a tube (how it is made will be explained later), large or small, regular or irregular, to extend far into the earth, near or through any great source of heat resulting from condensation, combustion, chemical action, or central fire. Now suppose this tube to be filled with water from surface or subterranean sources. Heat converts water, under the pressure of one atmosphere, or fifteen pounds to the square inch, into steam at a temperature of two hundred and twelve degrees. But under greater pressure more heat is required to make steam. The water never leaps and bubbles in an engine boiler. The awful pressure compels it to be quiet. A cubic inch of water will make a cubic foot - one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight times as much - of steam under the pressure of one atmosphere. But under the pressure of a column of water one thousand feet high, giving a pressure of four hundred and thirty-two pounds to the square inch at the bottom, water becomes steam, if at all, only by great heat. Every engineer knows that the pressure exerted by steam increases by great geometrical ratios as the heat increases by small arithmetical ratios. Steam made by two hundred and twelve degrees exerts a pressure, as we have said, of fifteen pounds.

To simply double the two hundred and twelve degrees of heat increases the steam pressure twenty-three times.

Now suppose the subterranean tube or lake of Old Faithful to be freshly filled with its million gallons of water. Sufficient heat makes steam under any pressure. It rises up the tube and is condensed to water again by the colder water above. Hence no commotion. But the whole volume of water grows hotter for an hour. When it is too hot to absorb the steam, and the tube is too narrow to let the amount made bubble up through the water, it lifts the whole mass with a sudden jerk. The instant the pressure of the water is taken off in any degree, the water below, that was kept water by the pressure, breaks into steam most voluminously, and the measureless power floods the earth and sky with water and steam.

It is also known that superheated steam suddenly takes on such great power that no boiler can hold it. Once let the water in a boiler get very low and no boiler can hold the force of the resultant superheated steam. The same heat that, applied to water, gives perfect safety, applied to steam gives utter destruction. Hence the amazing force of the vast jets of the geyser that follow the first spurts.

As soon as the steam is blown off the subterranean waterworks fill the tube and the process is repeated.

This modus operandi was first proposed as a theory by Bunsen in 1846, and later was demonstrated by the artificial geyser of Professor J. H. J. Muller, of Freiburg.


[Illustration: Pulpit Terrace and Bunsen Peak.]


MOUNTS OF MINERAL DEPOSITS

I have the extremely difficult task of representing emotions by words - glories of color and form seen by the eye by symbols meant to be addressed to the ear. Before seeking to describe the diverse colors made largely by one substance, let us remember that while silica, the principal part of these water-built mounds, is one of the three parts of granite, namely, the white crystal quartz, it is also the substance of the beautifully variegated jasper, the lapis lazuli, the green malachite, and the opal, with its cloudy milk-whiteness through which flashes its heart of fire. Silica and alumina combine to make common clay, but alumina forms itself into the red ruby, the golden-tinted topaz, the violet oriental amethyst, the red, white, yellow, and violet sapphire, and the beautiful green emerald. With substances of such rare capabilities we may expect rich results in color and form.

We turn now to deposits from water of these two substances, especially the first. About the Old Faithful geyser is a mound about one hundred and forty-five feet broad at the base, twelve feet high, jeweled over with pools of beauty of every shape, beaded and fretted with glories of color never seen before except in the sky. How were they made?

Water is a general solvent. It can take into its substance several similar bulks of other substances without greatly increasing its own, some actually diminishing it. Hot alkaline water will dissolve even silica rock. When water is saturated with sugar, salt, or other substance, if a little or much water is evaporated some of the saturating substance must be deposited as a solid. All crystals, as quartz or diamonds, have been made by deposits from water. Hot water can hold in solution much more of a solid than cold water. Therefore, when hot water comes out of the earth and is cooled, some of the saturating substance must be deposited as a solid. It is done in various ways, especially two.

Suppose a little pool with perpendicular sides, say twenty feet across. It leaps and boils two feet high. It deposits nothing till the water comes to the cooling edge. Then it builds up a wall where it overflows, and wherever it flows it builds. The result is that you walk up the gentle slopes of a broad flat cone, and find the little lakelet in a gorgeous setting, perfectly full at every point of the circumference. If there is but little overflow, the result may be to deposit all the matter where it first cools, and make a perpendicular wall around the cup two or ten feet high. If the overflow is too much to be cooled at once, the deposit may still be made fifty or one hundred feet from the point of issue. If the overflow is sufficient, it may be building up every inch of a vast cone at once, every foot being wet.


[Illustration: The Punch Bowl, Yellowstone Geysers.]

Many minerals are held in solution and are deposited at various stages of evaporation. Let us suppose the lake to have the bottom sloping toward the abysmal center; the different minerals will be assorted as if with a sieve. At the Sunlight Basin the edge is as flaming red as one ever sees in the sunlit sky. And every color ever seen in a sunset flames almost as brilliantly in the varying depths. Suppose a low cone to be flooded only occasionally, as in the case of the Old Faithful geyser. The cooled water falling from the upper air builds up, under the terrible drench of the cataract, walls three or four inches high, making pools of every conceivable shape, a few inches deep, in which are the most exquisite and varied colors ever seen by mortal eye. You walk about on these dividing walls and gaze into the beaded and impearled pools of a hundred shades of different colors, never equaled except by that perpetual glory of the sunset.

Consider the case of a pool that does not overflow. Just as lakes that have no outlet must grow more and more salt till some have become solid salt beds, so must this pool, tossing its hot waves two or three feet high, evaporate its water and deposit its solids. Where? First, against the cooler sides of the rock under the water, tending to reduce the opening to a mere throat. Second, each wavelet tossed in air is cooled, and deposits on the edge, solid as quartz, a crust that overhangs the pool and tends to close it over as with hot ice. It may build thus a mound fifteen feet high with an open throat in the middle. Thus the pool has constructed an intermittent geyser. If the water supply continues, it also destroys itself. The throat closes up by its own deposits. It is a case of geyseral membranous croup.

I exceedingly longed to try vivisection on a geyser, or at least take one of half a hundred, drain it off, and make a post-mortem examination. On my very last day I found opportunity. I found a dead geyser, though not by any means yet cold. It was still so hot that people had given it an infernal name. I squeezed myself down through its hot throat, which seemed a veritable open sepulcher, and found a cave about twenty-five feet deep, twelve feet wide, and about sixty feet long. It was elliptical in form, the sides coming together at a sharp angle at the ends, bottom, and top. The way down to the fiery heart of the earth had simply grown up by deposits of silex on the sides and at the bottom. The water had evaporated by the intense heat, and I was in the hot hollow that had once held an earthquake and volcano. When I squeezed up to the blessed upper air I was glad there was no help from below.

I could tell of mounds that grew so fast as to inclose the limbs of a tree, making the firmest kind of a ladder by which I climbed to the top; of floods that overflowed acres of forest, leaving every tree firmly planted in solid rock; of mounds hundreds of feet high, covering twenty acres with forms of indescribable beauty - but I despair. The half has not been told. It cannot be. Great and marvelous are all Your works, Lord God Almighty! In wisdom have You made them all.

Emerson says: "Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify." Using these faculties and not mere eyesight, one must surely say: "Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations not only surpasses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are."

// #27. The Grand Canon of the Colorado River

Before me lies a thin bit of red rock, rippled as delicately as a woman's hair, bearing marks of raindrops that came from the south. It was once soft clay. It was laid down close to the igneous Archaean rocks when Mother Earth was in her girlhood and water first began to flow. More clay flowed over, and all was hardened into rock. Many strata, variously colored and composed, were deposited, till our bit of beauty was buried thousands of feet deep. The strata were tilted variously and abraded wondrously, for our earth has been treated very much as the fair-armed bread-maker treats the lump of dough she doubles and kneads on the molding board. Other rocks of a much harder nature, composed in part of the shells of inexpressible multitudes of Ocean's infusoria, were laid down from the superincumbent sea. Still the delicate ripple marks were preserved. Nature's vast library was being formed, and on this scrap of a leaf not a letter was lost.

Beside this stone now lies another of the purest white. It once flowed as water impregnated with lime, and clung to the lower side of a rock now as high above the sea as many a famous mountain. The water gradually evaporated, and the lime still hung like tiny drops. Between the two stones now so near together was once a perpendicular distance of more than a mile of impenetrable rock. How did they ever get together? Let us see.

After the rock making, by the deposit of clay, limestone, etc., this vast plain was lifted seven thousand feet above the sea and rimmed round with mountains. Perhaps in being afterward volcanically tossed in one of this old world's spasms an irregular crack ripped its way along a few hundred miles. Into this crack rushed a great river, perhaps also an inland ocean or vast Lake Superior, of which Salt Lake may be a little remnant puddle. These tumultuous waters proceeded to pulverize, dissolve, and carry away these six thousand feet of rock deposited between the two stones. There was fall enough to make forty Niagaras.

I was once where a deluge of rain had fallen a few days before in a mountain valley. It tore loose some huge rocks and plunged down a precipice of one thousand feet. The rock at the bottom was crushed under the frightful weight of the tumbling superincumbent mass, and every few minutes the top became the bottom. In one hour millions of tons of rock were crushed to pebbles and spread for miles over the plain, filling up a whole village to the roofs of the houses. I knew three villages utterly destroyed by a rush of water only ten feet deep. Water and gravitation make a frightful plow. Here some prehistoric Mississippi turned its mighty furrows.

The Colorado River is one of our great rivers. It is over two thousand miles long, reaches from near our northern to beyond our southern border, and drains three hundred thousand square miles of the west side of the Rocky Mountains. Great as it remains, it is a mere thread to what it once was. It is easy to see that there were several epochs of work. Suppose the first one took off the upper limestone rock to the depth of several thousand feet. This cutting is of various widths. Just here it is eighteen miles wide; but as such rocks are of varying hardness there are many promontories that distinctly project out, say, half a mile from the general rim line, and rising in the center are various Catskill and Holyoke mountains, with defiantly perpendicular sides, that persisted in resisting the mighty rush of waters. The outer portions of their foundations were cut away by the mighty flood and, as the ages went by, occasionally the sides thundered into the chasm, leaving the wall positively perpendicular.

We may now suppose the ocean waters nearly exhausted and only the mighty rivers that had made that ocean were left to flow; indeed, the rising Sierras of some range unknown at the present may have shut off whole oceans of rain. The rivers that remained began to cut a much narrower channel into the softer sand and clay-rock below. From the great mountain-rimmed plateau rivers poured in at the sides, cutting lateral cañons down to the central flow. Between these stand the little Holyokes aforesaid, with greatly narrowed base.

I go down with most reverent awe and pick the little ripple-rain-marked leaf out of its place in the book of nature, a veritable table of stone written by the finger of God, and bring it up and lay it alongside of one formed, eons after, at the top. They be brothers both, formed by the same forces and for the same end.

Standing by this stupendous work of nature day after day, I try to stretch my mind to some large computation of the work done. A whole day is taken to go down the gorge to the river. It takes seven miles of zigzag trail, sometimes frightfully steep, along shelves not over two feet wide, under rock thousands of feet above and going down thousands of feet below, to get down that perpendicular mile. It was an immense day's work.

The day was full of perceptions of the grandeur of vast rock masses never before suggested, except by the mighty mass of the Matterhorn seen close by from its Hörnli shoulder.

There was the river - a regular freight train, running day and night, the track unincumbered with returning cars (they were returned by the elevated road of the upper air) - burdened with dissolved rock and earth.

A slip into this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles into the Gulf.

In the side cañon down which we worked our sublime and toilful way it was easy to see the work done. Sometimes the fierce torrent would pile the bottom of a side cañon with every variety of stone, from the wall a mile high, into one tremendous heap of conglomerate. The next rush of waters would tear a channel through this and pour millions of tons into the main river. For years Boston toiled, in feeble imitation of Milton's angels, to bring the Milton Hills into the back Bay and South Boston Flats. Boston made more land than the city originally contained, but it did not move a teaspoonful compared with these excavations.

The section traversed that day seemed while we were in it like a mighty chasm, a world half rent asunder, full of vast sublimities, but the next day, seen from the rim as a part of the mighty whole, it appeared comparatively little. One gets new meanings of the words almighty, eternity, infinity, in the presence of things done that seem to require them all.

In 1869 Major J. W. Powell, aided by nine men, attempted to pass down this tumultuous river with four boats specially constructed for the purpose. In ninety-eight days he had made one thousand miles, much of it in extremest peril. For weeks there was no possibility of climbing to the plateau above.

Any great scene in nature is like the woman you fall in love with at first sight for some pose of head, queenly carriage, auroral flush of color, penetrative music of voice, or a glance of soul through its illumined windows. You do not know much about her, but in long years of heroic endurance of trials, in the great dignity of motherhood, in the unspeakable comfortings that are scarcely short of godlike, and in the supernal, ineffable beauty and loveliness that cover it all, you find a richness and worth of which the most ardent lover never dreamed. The first sight of the cañon often brings strong men to their knees in awe and adoration. The gorge at Niagara is one hundred and fifty feet deep; it is far short of this, which is six thousand six hundred and forty. Great is the first impression, but in the longer and closer acquaintance every sense of beauty is flooded to the utmost.

The next morning I was out before "jocund day stood tiptoe on the breezy mountain tops." I have seen many sunrises In this world and one other: I have watched the moon slowly rolling its deep valleys for weeks into its morning sunlight. I knew what to expect. But nature always surpasses expectations. The sinuosities of the rim sent back their various colors. A hundred domes and spires, wind sculptured and water sculptured, reached up like Memnon to catch the first light of the sun, and seemed to me to break out into Memnonian music. As the world rolled the steady light penetrated deeper, shadows diminished, light spaces broadened and multiplied, till it seemed as if a new creation were veritably going forward and a new "Let there be light" had been uttered. I had seen it for the first time the night before in the mellow light of a nearly full moon, but the sunlight really seemed to make, in respect to breadth, depth, and definiteness, a new creation.

One peculiar effect I never noticed elsewhere. It is well known that the blue sky is not blue and there is no sky. Blue is the color of the atmosphere, and when seen in the miles deep overhead, or condensed in a jar, it shows its own true color. So, looking into this inconceivable cañon, the true color came out most beauteously. There was a background of red and yellowish rocks. These made the cold blue blush with warm color. The sapphire was backed with sardonyx, and the bluish white of the chalcedony was half pellucid to the gold chrysolite behind it. God was laying the foundation of His perfect city there, and the light of it seemed fit for the redeemed to walk in, and to have been made by the luminousness of Him who is light.

One great purpose of this world is its use as significant symbol and hint of the world to come. The communication of ideas and feelings there is not by slow, clumsy speech, often misunderstood, originally made to express low physical wants, but it is by charade, panorama, parable, and music rolling like the voice of many waters in a storm. The greatest things and relations of earth are as hintful of greater things as a bit of float ore in the plains is suggestive of boundless mines in the upper hills. So the joy of finding one lost lamb in the wilderness tells of the joy of finding and saving a human soul. One should never go to any of God's great wonders to see sights, but to live life; to read in them the figures, symbols, and types of the more wonderful things in the new heavens and the new earth.

The old Hebrew prophets and poets saw God everywhere in nature. The floods clap their hands and the hills are joyful together before the Lord. Miss Proctor, in the Yosemite, caught the same lofty spirit, and sang:

"Perpetual masses here intone,
Uncounted censers swing,
A psalm on every breeze is blown;
The echoing peaks from throne to throne
Greet the indwelling King;
The Lord, the Lord is everywhere,
And seraph-tongued are earth and air."

// #26. The Matterhorn

The Matterhorn is peculiar. I do not know of another mountain like it on the earth. There are such splintered and precipitous spires on the moon. How it came to be such I treated of fully in Sights and Insights. It is approximately a three-sided mountain, fourteen thousand seven hundred and eighteen feet high, whose sides are so steep as to be unassailable. Approach can be made only along the angle at the junction of the planes.


[Illustration: The Matterhorn.]

It was long supposed to be inaccessible. Assault after assault was made on it by the best and most ambitious Alp climbers, but it kept its virgin height untrodden. However, in 1864, seven men, almost unexpectedly, achieved the victory; but in descending four of them were precipitated, down an almost perpendicular declivity, four thousand feet. They had achieved the summit after hundreds of others had failed. They had reveled in the upper glories, deposited proof of their visit, and started to return. According to law, they were roped together. According to custom, in a difficult place all remain still, holding the rope, except one who carefully moves on. Croz, the first guide, was reaching up to take the feet of Mr. Haddow and help him down to where he stood. Suddenly Haddow's strength failed, or he slipped and struck Croz on the shoulders, knocking him off his narrow footing. They two immediately jerked off Rev. Mr. Hudson. The three falling jerked off Lord Francis Douglas. Four were loose and falling; only three left on the rocks. Just then the rope somehow parted, and all four dropped that great fraction of a mile. The mountain climber makes a sad pilgrimage to the graves of three of them in Zermatt; the fourth probably fell in a crevasse of the glacier at the foot, and may be brought to the sight of friends in perhaps two score years, when the river of ice shall have moved down into the valleys where the sun has power to melt away the ice. This accident gave the mountain a reputation for danger to which an occasional death on it since has added.

Each of these later unfortunate occurrences is attributable to personal perversity or deficiency. Peril depends more on the man than on circumstances. One is in danger on a wall twenty feet high, another safe on a precipice of a thousand feet. No man has a right to peril his life in mere mountain climbing; that great sacrifice must be reserved for saving others, or for establishing moral principle.

The morning after coming from Monte Rosa myself and son left Zermatt at half past seven for the top of the Matterhorn, twelve hours distant, under the guidance of Peter Knubel, his brother, and Peter Truffer, three of the best guides for this work in the country. In an hour the dwellings of the mountain-loving people are left behind, the tree limit is passed soon after, the grass cheers us for three hours, when we enter on the wide desolation of the moraines. Here is a little chapel. I entered it as reverently and prayed as earnestly for God's will, not mine, to be done as I ever did in my life, and I am confident that amid the unutterable grandeur that succeeded I felt his presence and help as fully as at any other time.

At ten minutes of two we were roped together and feeling our way carefully in the cut steps on a glacier so steep that, standing erect, one could put his hand upon it. We were on this nearly an hour. Just as we left it for the rocks a great noise above, and a little to the south, attracted attention. A vast mass of stone had detached itself from the overhanging cliff at the top, and falling on the steep slope had broken into a hundred pieces. These went bounding down the side in long leaps. Wherever one struck a cloud of powdered stone leaped into the air, till the whole mountain side smoked and thundered with the grand cannonade. The omen augured to me that the mountain was going to do its best for our reception and entertainment. Fortunately these rock avalanches occur on the steep, unapproachable sides, and not at the angle where men climb.

How the mountain grew upon us as we clung to its sides! When the great objects below had changed to littleness the heights above seemed greater than ever. At half past four we came to a perpendicular height of twenty feet, with a slight slope above. Down this precipice hung a rope; there was also an occasional projection of an inch or two of stone for the mailed foot. At the top, on a little shelf, under hundreds of feet of overhanging rock, some stones had been built round and over a little space for passing the night. The rude cabin occupied all the width of the shelf, so that passing to its other end there was not room to walk without holding on by one's hands in the crevices of the wall. We were now at home; had taken nine hours to do what could be done in eight. What an eyrie in which to sleep! Below us was a sheer descent, of a thousand or two feet, to the glacier. Above us towered the crest of the mountain, seemingly higher than ever. The sharp shadow of the lofty pyramid lengthened toward Monte Rosa. Italy lifted up its mountains tipped with sunshine to cheer us. The Obernese Alps, beyond the Rhone, answered with numerous torches to light us to our sleep. According to prearrangement, at eight o'clock we kindled a light on our crag to tell our friends in Zermatt that we had accomplished the first stage of our journey. They answered instantly with a cheery blaze, and we lay down to sleep.

When four of us lay together I was so crowded against the wall that I thought if it should give way I could fall two thousand feet out of bed without possibility of stopping on the way. The ice was two feet thick on the floor, and by reason of the scarcity of bedding I was reminded of the damp, chilly sheets of some unaired guest-chambers. I do not think I slept a moment, but I passed the night in a most happy, thoughtful, and exultant frame of mind.

At half past three in the morning we were roped together - fifteen feet of rope between each two men - for the final three or four hours' work. It is everywhere steep; it is every minute hands and feet on the rocks; sometimes you cling with fingers, elbows, knees, and feet, and are tempted to add the nose and chin. Where it is least steep the guide's heels are right in your face; when it is precipitous you only see a line of rope before you. We make the final pause an hour before the top. Here every weight and the fear that so easily besets one must be laid aside. No part of the way has seemed so difficult; not even that just past--when we rounded a shoulder on the ice for sixty feet, sometimes not over twenty inches wide, on the verge of a precipice four thousand feet high. To this day I can see the wrinkled form of that far-down glacier below, though I took care not to make more than one glance at it.

The rocks become smoother and steeper, if possible. A chain or rope trails from above in four places. You have good hope that it is well secured, and wish you were lighter, as you go up hand over hand. Then a beautiful slope for hands, knees, and feet for half an hour, and the top is reached at half past six.

The view is sublime. Moses on Pisgah could have had no such vision. He had knowledge added of the future grandeur of his people, but such a revelation as this tells so clearly what God can do for his people hereafter that that element of Moses's enjoyment can be perceived, if not fully appreciated. All the well-known mountains stand up like friends to cheer us. Mont Blanc has the smile of the morning sun to greet us withal. Monte Rosa chides us for not partaking of her prepared visions. The kingdoms of the world - France, Switzerland, Italy - are at our feet. One hundred and twenty snow-peaks flame like huge altar piles in the morning sun. The exhilarant air gives ecstasy to body, the new visions intensity of feeling to soul. The Old World has sunk out of sight. This is Mount Zion, the city of God. New Jerusalem has come down out of heaven adorned as a bride for her husband. The pavements are like glass mingled with fire. The gates of the morning are pearl. The walls, near or far according to your thought, are like jasper and sapphire. The glory of God and of the Lamb lightens it.

But we must descend, though it is good to be here. It is even more difficult and tedious than the ascent. Non facilis descensus. With your face to the mountain you have only the present surface and the effort for that instant. But when you turn your back on the mountain the imminent danger appears. It is not merely ahead, but the sides are much more dangerous. On the way down we had more cannonades. In six hours we were off the cliffs, and by half past three we had let ourselves down, inch by inch, to Zermatt, a distance of nine thousand four hundred feet.

Looking up to the Matterhorn this next morning after the climb, I feel for it a personal affection. It has put more pictures of grandeur into my being than ever entered in such a way before. It is grand enough to bear acquaintance. People who view it from a distance must be strangers. It has been, and ever will be, a great example and lofty monument of my Father's power. He takes up the isles as a very little thing; He touches the mountains and they smoke. The strength of the hills is His also; and He has made all things for His children, and waits to do greater things than these.

// #25. The Monte Rosa

Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of thought and endeavor in Europe. We are occasionally surprised by hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere, and we wonder why they went there. The Alps are a great object of interest to all Europe. I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478 works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller. It seems incredible. In this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology, botany, and one volume of Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont Blanc. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends folded over.

It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for bugs. Every rod is a schoolhouse. They speak of the "snow mountains" with ardent affection. Every Englishman, having no mountains at home, speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps. He, however, cares less for their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability. The name of every mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand testimonial of his ability at home.

There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy. In the grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of the most interesting exhibits. This general interest in the Alps is a testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach, and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the enervating influences of civilization. There is one place in the world devoted by divine decree to pure air. You are obliged to use it. Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect air. Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done. He crawled out of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that time. In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge, training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work, man does well to be interested.

You want to ascend these mountains? Come to Zermatt. With a wand ten miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks. Europe has but one higher. Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your house - only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the house. This takes three hours - an hour to each hundred stories; after the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the Görner Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the glorious revelations of the morrow.

The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good for your pluck! Bon voyage, gute reise," and went to bed. In an hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier. The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long, was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was clouded, and so were we. Soon it came out again, and continued clear. But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his servants.

Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain. Six hours and a half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight. I have no fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do the ascents. They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and enjoy, but to boast. We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow of ice below. We scramble up the rocks of the mountain. Hour after hour we toil upward. At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all four roped together. There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them. If a man drops in the rest must pull him out. Being heavier than any other man of the party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay of dangling by a rope in a chasm. The beauty of these cold blue ice vaults cannot be described. They are often fringed with icicles. In one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an apparently reversed condition. We passed one place where vast masses of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start a new avalanche. We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops.

How the view widened! How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened the effect in the valley below! The glorious air made us know what the man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive. Some have little occasion to be thankful in that respect.

Here we learned the use of a guide. Having carefully chosen him, by testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only generally, but step by step. Put each foot in his track. He had trodden the snow to firmness. But being heavier than he it often gave way under my pressure. One such slump and recovery takes more strength than ten regular steps. Not so in following the Guide to the fairer and greater heights of the next world. He who carried this world and its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever breaks down the track. And just so in that upward way, one fall and recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps.

Meanwhile, what of the weather? Uncertainty. Avalanches thundered from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in the air. The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm. Still the sun shone clear. We had put in six of the eight hours' work of ascent when snow began to fall. Soon it was too thick to see far. We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm. It was only twenty feet wide. Getting round this the storm deepened till we could scarcely see one another. There was no mountain, no sky. We halted of necessity. The guide said, "Go back." I said, "Wait." We waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which we had come - our only guide back if the storm continued - was lost except the holes made by the Alpenstocks. The snow drifted over, and did not fill these so quickly.

Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down. In an hour we got below the storm. The valley into which we looked was full of brightest sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk. In another hour the whole sky was perfectly clear. Oh, that I had kept my faith in my aneroid! Had I held to the faith that started me in the morning - endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied apparent knowledge of local guides - and then been able to surmount the difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the cleared air. Better things were prepared for me than I knew; indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of darkness and storm.

I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and softened snow, and said to the guide, "Tomorrow I start for the Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to Zermatt.

Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination, has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.

// #24. Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

We are a fighting race; not because we enjoy fights, but we enjoy the exercise of force. In early times when we knew of no forces to handle but our own, and no object to exercise them on but our fellow-men, there were feuds, tyrannies, wars, and general desolation. In the Thirty Years' War the population of Germany was starved and murdered down from sixteen millions to less than five millions.

But since we have found field, room, and ample verge for the play of our forces in material realms, and have acquired mastery of the superb forces of nature, we have come to an era of peace. We can now use our forces and those of nature with as real a sense of dominion and mastery on material things, resulting in comfort, as formerly on our fellow-men, resulting in ruin. We now devote to the conquest of nature what we once devoted to the conquest of men. There is a fascination in looking on force and its results. Some men never stand in the presence of an engine in full play without a feeling of reverence, as if they stood in the presence of God - and they do.

The turning to these forces is a characteristic of our age that makes it an age of adventure and discovery. The heart of equatorial Africa has been explored, and soon the poles will hold no undiscovered secrets.

Among the great monuments of power the mountains stand supreme. All the cohesions, chemical affinities, affections of metals, liquids, and gases are in full play, and the measureless power of gravitation. And yet higher forces have chasmed, veined, infiltrated, disintegrated, molded, bent the rocky strata like sheets of paper, and lifted the whole mass miles in air as if it were a mere bubble of gas.

The study of these powers is one of the fascinations of our time. Let me ask you to enjoy with me several of the greatest manifestations of force on this world of ours.

The Monte Rosa

Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of thought and endeavor in Europe. We are occasionally surprised by hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere, and we wonder why they went there. The Alps are a great object of interest to all Europe. I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478 works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller. It seems incredible. In this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology, botany, and one volume of Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont Blanc. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends folded over.

It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for bugs. Every rod is a schoolhouse. They speak of the "snow mountains" with ardent affection. Every Englishman, having no mountains at home, speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps. He, however, cares less for their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability. The name of every mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand testimonial of his ability at home.

There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy. In the grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of the most interesting exhibits. This general interest in the Alps is a testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach, and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the enervating influences of civilization. There is one place in the world devoted by divine decree to pure air. You are obliged to use it. Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect air. Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done. He crawled out of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that time. In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge, training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work, man does well to be interested.

You want to ascend these mountains? Come to Zermatt. With a wand ten miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks. Europe has but one higher. Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your house - only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the house. This takes three hours - an hour to each hundred stories; after the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the Görner Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the glorious revelations of the morrow.

The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good for your pluck! Bon voyage, gute reise," and went to bed. In an hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier. The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long, was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was clouded, and so were we. Soon it came out again, and continued clear. But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his servants.

Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain. Six hours and a half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight. I have no fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do the ascents. They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and enjoy, but to boast. We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow of ice below. We scramble up the rocks of the mountain. Hour after hour we toil upward. At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all four roped together. There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them. If a man drops in the rest must pull him out. Being heavier than any other man of the party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay of dangling by a rope in a chasm. The beauty of these cold blue ice vaults cannot be described. They are often fringed with icicles. In one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an apparently reversed condition. We passed one place where vast masses of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start a new avalanche. We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops.

How the view widened! How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened the effect in the valley below! The glorious air made us know what the man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive. Some have little occasion to be thankful in that respect.

Here we learned the use of a guide. Having carefully chosen him, by testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only generally, but step by step. Put each foot in his track. He had trodden the snow to firmness. But being heavier than he it often gave way under my pressure. One such slump and recovery takes more strength than ten regular steps. Not so in following the Guide to the fairer and greater heights of the next world. He who carried this world and its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever breaks down the track. And just so in that upward way, one fall and recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps.

Meanwhile, what of the weather? Uncertainty. Avalanches thundered from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in the air. The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm. Still the sun shone clear. We had put in six of the eight hours' work of ascent when snow began to fall. Soon it was too thick to see far. We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm. It was only twenty feet wide. Getting round this the storm deepened till we could scarcely see one another. There was no mountain, no sky. We halted of necessity. The guide said, "Go back." I said, "Wait." We waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which we had come - our only guide back if the storm continued - was lost except the holes made by the Alpenstocks. The snow drifted over, and did not fill these so quickly.

Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down. In an hour we got below the storm. The valley into which we looked was full of brightest sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk. In another hour the whole sky was perfectly clear. O that I had kept my faith in my aneroid! Had I held to the faith that started me in the morning - endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied apparent knowledge of local guides - and then been able to surmount the difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the cleared air. Better things were prepared for me than I knew; indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of darkness and storm.

I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and softened snow, and said to the guide, "Tomorrow I start for the Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to Zermatt.

Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination, has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.

// #23. The Next World to Conquer

Man's next realm of conquest is the celestial ether. It has higher powers, greater intensities, and quicker activities than any realm he has yet attempted.

When the emissory or corpuscular theory of light had to be abandoned a medium for light's interplay between worlds had to be conceived. The existence of an all-pervasive medium called the luminiferous ether was launched as a theory. Its reality has been so far demonstrated that but very few doubters remain.

What facts of its conditions and powers can be known? It differs almost totally from our conceptions of matter. Of the eighteen necessary properties of matter perhaps only one, extension, can be predicated of it. It is unlimited, all-pervasive; even where worlds are non-attractive, does not accumulate about suns or other bodies; has no structure, chemical relations, nor inertia; is not heatable, and is not cognizable by any of our present senses. Does it not take us one step toward an apprehension of the revealed condition of spirit?

Recall its actual activities. Two hundred and fifty-eight vibrations of air per second produce on the ear the sensation we call do, or C of the soprano scale; five hundred and sixteen give the upper C, or an octave above. So the sound runs up in air till, above, say, thirty-five thousand vibrations per second, there is plenty of sound inaudible to our ears. But not inaudible to finer ears. To them the morning stars sing together in mighty chorus:

"Forever singing as they shine,
'The hand that made us is divine.'"

Electricity has as great a variety of vibrations as sound. Since some kinds of electricity do not readily pass through space devoid of air, though light and heat do, it seems likely that some of the lower intensities and slower vibrations of electricity are not in ether but in air. Certainly some of the higher intensities are in ether. Between two hundred and four hundred millions of millions of vibrations of ether per second are the different sorts of heat. Between four hundred and eight hundred vibrations are the different colors of light. Beyond eight hundred vibrations there is plenty of light, invisible to our eyes, known as chemical rays and probably the Roentgen rays. Beyond these are there vibrations for thought-transference? Who knoweth?

These familiar facts are called up to show the almost infinite capacities and intensities of the ether. Matter is more forceful, as it is less dense. Rock is solid, and has little force except obstinate resistance. Steam is rarer and more forceful. Gases suddenly born of dynamite touched by fire in the rock under a mountain have the tremendous pressure of eighty thousand pounds to the square inch. Ether is so rare that its density, compared with water, is represented by a decimal fraction with twenty-seven ciphers before it.

When the worlds navigate this sea, do they plow through it as a ship through the waves, forcing them aside, or as a sieve letting the water through it? Doubtless the sieve is the better symbol. Certainly the vibrations flow through solid glass and most solid diamond. To be sure, they are a little hampered by the solid substance. The speed of light is reduced from one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second in space to one hundred and twenty thousand in glass. If ether can so readily go through such solids, no wonder that a spirit body could appear to the disciples, "the doors being shut."

Marvelous discoveries in the capacities of ether have been made lately. In 1842 Joseph Henry found that electric waves in the top of his house provoked action in a wire circuit in the cellar, through two floors and ceilings, without wire connections. More than twenty years ago Professor Loomis, of the United States coast survey, telegraphed twenty miles between mountains by electric impulses sent from kites. Last year Mr. Preece, the cable being broken, sent, without wires, one hundred and fifty-six messages between the mainland and the island of Mull, a distance of four and a half miles. Marconi, an Italian, has sent recognizable signals through seven or eight thick walls of the London post-office, and three fourths of a mile through a hill. Jagadis Chunder Bose, of India, has fired a pistol by an electric vibration seventy-five feet away and through more than four feet of masonry. Since brick does not elastically vibrate to such infinitesimal impulses as electric waves, ether must. It has already been proven that one can telegraph to a flying train from the overhead wires. Ether is a far better medium of transmission than iron. A wire will now carry eight messages each way, at the same time, without interference. What will not the more facile ether do?

Such are some of the first vague suggestions of a realm of power and knowledge not yet explored. They are mere auroral hints of a new dawn. The full day is yet to shine.

Like timid children, we have peered into the schoolhouse - afraid of the unknown master. If we will but enter we shall find that the Master is our Father, and that He has fitted up this house, out of His own infinite wisdom, skill, and love, that we may be like Him in wisdom and power as well as in love.

// #22. Mobility of Seeming Solids

When a human breath, or the white jet of a steam whistle, or the black cough of a locomotive smokestack is projected into the air it is easy to see that the air is mobile. Its particles easily roll over one another in voluminously infolding wreaths. The same is seen in water. The crest of a wave falls over a portion of air, imprisoning it for a moment, and the mingled air and water of different densities prevent the light of the sun or sky from going straight down into the black depths and being lost, but by being reflected and turned back it shows like beautiful white lace, constantly created and dissolved with a thousandfold more beauty than any that ever came from human hands. All the three shifting elements of the swift creations are mobile. This seems to be the case because these elements are not solid. The particles have plenty of room to play about each other, to execute mazy dances and minuets with vastly more space than substance.

Extend the thought a little. Things that seem to us most solid are equally mobile. An iron wire seems solid. It is so; some parts much more so than others. The surface that has been in closest contact with the die as the wire was drawn through, reducing its size by one half, perhaps, is vastly more dense than the inner parts that have not been so condensed. File away one tenth of a wire, taking it all from the surface, and you weaken the tensile strength of the wire one half. But, dense and solid as this iron is, its particles are as mobile within certain limits as the particles of air. An electric message sent through a mile of wire is not anything transmitted; matter is not transferred, but the particles are set to dancing in wavy motion from end to end. Particles are leaping within ordered limits and according to regular laws as really as the clouds swirl and the air trembles into song through the throat of a singer. When a wire is made sensitive by electricity the breath of a child can make it vibrate from end to end, ensouled with the child's laughter or fancies. Nay, more, and far more wonderful, the wire will be sensitive to the number of vibrations of a certain note of music, and no receiver at the other end will gather up its sensitive tremblings unless it is pitched to the keynote of the vibrations sent. In this way eight sets of vibrations have been sent on one wire both ways at the same time, and no set of signals has in any way interfered with the completeness and audibility of the rest. Sixteen sets of waltzes were being performed at one and the same time by the particles of one wire without confusion. Because the air is transmitting the notes of an organ from the loft to the opposite end of the church, it is not incapable of bringing the sound of a voice in an opposite direction to the organist from the other end of the church.

The extreme mobility of steel is seen when the red-hot metal is plunged into water. Instantly every particle takes a new position, making it a hundredfold more hard than before it was heated. But these particles of transferred steel are still mobile. A man's razor does not cut smoothly. It is dull, or has a ragged edge that is more inclined to draw tears than cut hairs. He draws the razor over the tender palm of his hand a few times, rearranges the particles of the edge and builds them out into a sharper form. Then the razor returns to the lip with the dainty touch of a kiss instead of a saw. Or the tearful man dips the razor in hot water and the particles run out to make a wider blade and, of course, a thinner, sharper edge. Drop the tire of a wagon wheel into a circular fire. As the heat increases each particle says to its neighbor, "Please stand a little further off; this more than July heat is uncomfortable." So the close friends stand a little further apart, lengthening the tire an inch or two. Then, being taken out of the fire and put on the wheel and cooled, the particles snuggle up together again, holding the wheel with a grip of cold iron. Mobile and loose, with plenty of room to play, as the particles have, neither wire nor tire loses its tensile strength. They hold together, whether arms are locked around each other's waist, or hand clasps hand in farther reach. What change has come to iron when it has been made red or white hot? Its particles have simply been mobilized. It differs from cold iron as an army in barracks and forts differs from an army mobilized. Nothing has been added but movement. There is no caloric substance. Heat is a mode of motion. The particles of iron have been made to vibrate among themselves. When the rapidity of movement reaches four hundred and sixty millions of millions of vibrations per second it so affects the eye that we say it is red-hot. When other systems of vibration have been added for yellow, etc., up to seven hundred and thirty millions of millions for the violet, and all continue in full play, the eye perceives what we call white heat. It is a simple illustration of the readiness of seeming solids to vibrate with almost infinite swiftness.

I have been to-day in what is to me a kind of heaven below - the workshop of my much-loved friend, John A. Brashear, in Allegheny, Pa. He easily makes and measures things to one four-hundred-thousandth of an inch of accuracy. I put my hand for a few seconds on a great piece of glass three inches thick. The human heat raised a lump detectable by his measurements. We were testing a piece of glass half an inch thick; and five inches in diameter. I put my two thumbnails at the two sides as it rested on its bed, and could see at once that I had compressed the glass to a shorter diameter. We twisted it in so many ways that I said, "That is a piece of glass putty." And yet it was the firmest texture possible to secure. Great lenses are so sensitive that one cannot go near them without throwing them discernibly out of shape. It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable mountains. I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you into so much of his finest thinking." He is a mechanic, not a theologian. This foremost man in the world in his fine department was lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer in a rolling mill.

But for elasticity and mobility nothing approaches the celestial ether. Its vibrations reach into millions of millions per second, and its wave-lengths for extreme red light are only .0000266 of an inch long, and for extreme violet still less - .0000167 of an inch.

It is easier molding hot iron than cold, mobile things than immobile. This world has been made elastic, ready to take new forms. New creations are easy, for man, even - much more so for God. Of angels, Milton says:

"Thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest."

No less is it true of atoms. In him all things live and move. Such intense activities could not be without an infinite God immanent in matter.

// #21. Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms

Ultimate atoms of matter are asserted to be impenetrable. That is, if a mass of them really touched each other, that mass would not be condensible by any force. But atoms of matter do not touch. It is thinkable, but not demonstrable, that condensation might go on till there were no discernible substance left, only force.

Matter exists in three states: solid, liquid, and gas. It is thought that all matter may be passed through the three stages - iron being capable of being volatilized, and gases condensed to liquids and solids - the chief difference of these states being greater or less distance between the constituent atoms and molecules. In gas the particles are distant from each other, like gnats flying in the air; in liquids, distant as men passing in a busy street; in solids, as men in a congregation, so sparse that each can easily move about. The congregation can easily disperse to the rarity of those walking in the street, and the men in the street condense to the density of the congregation. So, matter can change in going from solids to liquids and gases, or vice versa. The behavior of atoms in the process is surpassingly interesting.

Gold changes its density, and therefore its thickness, between the two dies of the mint that make it money. How do the particles behave as they snuggle up closer to each other?

Take a piece of iron wire and bend it. The atoms on the inner side become nearer together, those on the outside farther apart. Twist it. The outer particles revolve on each other; those of the middle do not move. They assume and maintain their new relations.

Hang a weight on a wire. It does not stretch like a rubber thread, but it stretches. Eight wires were tested as to their tensile strength. They gave an average of forty-five pounds, and an elongation averaging nineteen per cent of the total length. Then a wire of the same kind was given time to adjust itself to its new and trying circumstances. Forty pounds were hung on one day, three pounds more the next day, and so on, increasing the weights by diminishing quantities, till in sixty days it carried fifty-seven pounds. So it seems that exercise strengthened the wire nearly twenty-seven per cent.

While those atoms are hustling about, lengthening the wire and getting a better grip on one another, they grow warm with the exercise. Hold a thick rubber band against your lip - suddenly stretch it. The lip easily perceives the greater heat. After a few moments let it contract. The greater coldness is equally perceptible.

A wire suspending thirty-nine pounds being twisted ninety-five full turns lengthened itself one sixteen-hundredth of its length. Being further twisted by twenty-five turns it shortened itself one fourth of its previous elongation. During the twisting some sections took far more torsion than others. A steel wire supporting thirty-nine pounds was twisted one hundred and twenty times and then allowed to untwist at will. It let out only thirty-eight turns and retained eighty-two in the new permanent relation of particles. A wire has been known to accommodate itself to nearly fourteen hundred twists, and still the atoms did not let go of each other. They slid about on each other as freely as the atoms of water, but they still held on. It is easier to conceive of these atoms sliding about, making the wire thinner and longer, when we consider that it is the opinion of our best physicists that molecules made of atoms are never still. Masses of matter may be still, but not the constituent elements. They are always in intensest activity, like a mass of bees - those inside coming out, outside ones going in - but the mass remains the same.

The atoms of water behave extraordinarily. I know of a boiler and pipes for heating a house. When the fire was applied and the temperature was changed from that of the street to two hundred degrees, it was easy to see that there was a whole barrel more of it than when it was let into the boiler. It had been swollen by the heat, but it was nothing but water.

Mobile, flexible, and yielding as water seems to be, it has an obstinacy quite remarkable. It was for a long time supposed to be absolutely incompressible. It is nearly so. A pressure that would reduce air to one hundredth of its bulk would not discernibly affect water. Put a ton weight on a cubic inch of water; it does not flinch nor perceptibly shrink, yet the atoms of water do not fill the space they occupy. They object to being crowded. They make no objection to having other matter come in and possess the space unoccupied by them.

Air so much enjoys its free, agile state, leaping over hills and plains, kissing a thousand flowers, that it greatly objects to being condensed to a liquid. First we must take away all the heat. Two hundred and ten degrees of heat changes water to steam filling 1,728 times as much space. No amount of pressure will condense steam to water unless the heat is removed. So take heat away from air till it is more than two hundred degrees below zero, and then a pressure of about two hundred atmospheres (14.7 pounds each) changes common air to fluid. It fights desperately against condensation, growing hot with the effort, and it maintains its resilience for years at any point of pressure short of the final surrender that gives up to become liquid.

Perhaps sometime we shall have the pure air of the mountains or the sea condensed to fluid and sold by the quart to the dwellers in the city, to be expanded into air once more.

The marvel is not greater that gas is able to sustain itself under the awful pressure with its particles in extreme dispersion, than that what we call solids should have their molecules in a mazy dance and yet keep their strength.

Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations, not only surpasses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are.

// #20. Creations Now in Progress

The forces of creation are yet in full play. Who can direct them? Rewards greater than Tilghman's await the thinker. We are permitted not only to think God's thoughts after him, but to do his works. "Greater works than these that I do shall he do who believeth on me," says the Greatest Worker. Great profit incites to do the work noted below.

Carbon as charcoal is worth about six cents a bushel; as plumbago, for lead pencils or for the bicycle chain, it is worth more; as diamond it has been sold for $500,000 for less than an ounce, and that was regarded as less than half its value. Such a stone is so valuable that $15,000 has been spent in grinding and polishing its surface. The glazier pays $5.00 for a bit of carbon so small that it would take about ten thousand of them to make an ounce.

Why is there such a difference in value? Simply arrangement and compactness. Can we so enormously enhance the value of a bushel of charcoal by arrangement and compression? Not very satisfactorily as yet. We can apply almost limitless pressure, but that does not make diamonds. Every particle must go to its place by some law and force we have not yet attained the mastery of.

We do not know and control the law and force in nature that would enable us to say to a few million bricks, stones, bits of glass, etc., "Fly up through earth, water, and air, and combine into a perfect palace, with walls, buttresses, towers, and windows all in exact architectural harmony." But there is such a law and force for crystals, if not for palaces. There is wisdom to originate and power to manage such a force. It does not take masses of rock and stick them together, nor even particles from a fluid, but atoms from a gas. Atoms as fine as those of air must be taken and put in their place, one by one, under enormous pressure, to have the resulting crystal as compact as a diamond.

The force of crystallization is used by us in many inferior ways, as in making crystals of rock candy, sulphur, salt, etc., but for the making of diamonds it is too much for us, except in a small way.

While we cannot yet use the force that builds large white diamonds we can use the diamonds themselves. Set a number of them around a section of an iron tube, place it against a rock, at the surface or deep down in a mine, cause it to revolve rapidly by machinery, and it will bore into the rock, leaving a core. Force in water, to remove the dust and chips, and the diamond teeth will eat their way hundreds of feet in any direction; and by examining the extracted core miners can tell what sort of ore there is hundreds of feet in advance. Hence, they go only where they know that value lies.