Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1886-08-02

trine of special providences, and not
mslead the people with doubtfulIy
orthodox views drawn from modern
infdel science.
Such sanitary heathenism as [
have here derisively described has
been, in great measure, overcome
within our commonwealth by enlight-
ened legislation and by the persist
ent, diligent, and judicious efforts
of the State Board of Health; but
it still exists, here and there, with
enduring powers of resistance, and
everywhere as disturbing element.
Unfinchingly, apply it to the caus-
tic potash of satire, and have no in
clination to treat it with the unguents
of emollient speech. 1t is said that
molasses is better than vinegar to
catch flies. The more you have of
such carrion-fed flies, the worse you
are off. With the erring and the
well-disposed, with the teachable, our
patience should be abiding, exhaust
less, and tender.
Many an unfortunate man weaves
about himself and his household.
through his own sanitary ignorance,
and not unfrequently with the con-
currence of another's sanitary crime,
fate more terrible than that re-
counted by the shade of Ugolino to
Dante in the Inferno.
have no disposition to pronounce
a maledictlon upon my fellowmen ;
but, within my own knowledge, more
than one poor household has perish
ed as pitiabIy, not with hunger but
with fever, for which hard, indif-
ferent, avaricious landlord, who
could not be made to answer at the
bar of sanitary justice, shall answer
in the great hereafter. What the
finger of retributiOn has written on
the forehead of the offender cannot
be erased by the blasphemons and es-
sentially mendacious cry, Gam | my
brothers keeper?" And he who, by
his sanitary stupidity and obduracy,
drags down to untimely sepulture
with himself, his wife and his little
ones, shall not be allowed to plead
ignulance of natures ineXorable law
before Il Judge who endowed him
with powers of knowing, understand
ing, and obeying.
HOW NATURAL GAS rs PRO-
DUCED.
At present fact and inference COM
bined seem to show here the exist
ence of active agencies producing
the gas in constant operation. Be-
meath our feet is great arch of
fractured rock, through 'innnmerable
crevices in which everywhere along
its crest this invisible substance is
constantly escaping into the open
air. Wherever water covers the sur
face along the line of fracture the
gas is seen bubbling up through 1t.
Investigation has shown us that
there are no depths in the rocky
crust of the earth so profound that
water from the. surface has not
reached them; and it has been dem
onstrated that water in contact with
red-hot carbon will produce the iden-
tical gas which forms nine parts out
| of ten of that which flows now from
our wells OF that reaches the air
through natural crevices. The other
tenth, on the premises assumed,
could be very readily accounted for.
Note, in this connection. that no
physical fact is more clearly sub
stantiated than that the internal heat
of the earth increases one degree
Fahrenheit for every forty-five or fif-
ty feet in depth that we penetrate
into its crust. What does that mean?
| Penetrate into it a mile and q half,
and you get to boiling water. Dig
or drill down into it, if it were posi-
BILE, seven or eight miles, and you
reach point at which the carbon or
the lower rocks IS bathed in the glow
of a furnace. Through various chan
nels the fissures extending down un-
der the synclinals and by absorption
and transmission through porous
rocks at their outcrops, water finds
its way down these. The plan of
structure of the great trough itself
within which all the materials are in
closed, seemed designed expressly
| for the effects that we see produced,
and no condition that we know of,
essential to the constant formation
of the gas, fails to be supplied.
THESE ARE SOLID FACTS.
The hest blood uurifer and system regulator ever