While many look upon the Earth as “a vale of tears,” it is the best world we have any reliable knowledge of, and seems well adapted to the wants of animal and vegetable life, if we avail ourselves of the wise and ample provisions Nature has put in our way. If there is another and better world to come, it is hard to imagine that pearly gates and golden streets can conduce as much to our comfort, or will be as goodly a heritage as one of “sweet fields arrayed in living green,” with shady groves, blooming gardens, and generous fountains of pure sparkling waters, and not the thirsty abode experienced by Dives. While on this Earth, Nature has supplied with prodigality for this life’s wants, land and water, light and darkness, floods and drouth, and, as learned from Paul, four kinds of flesh (and he didn’t say how many kinds of vegetables) reptiles, insects, worms, bugs, microbes, poison and its antidotes, good people and bad, heat and cold, salt and fresh water, scientists, cranks and fools, yet with all this profusion of gifts, we would be no better off than Dives in Sheol without the indispensable blessing of water supplied by Symmes’s Hole. A few more questions and done. Why should sea soundings five miles deep be at temperatures below freezing, if, as is claimed, such a depth in land borings would be in a molten condition, and going much farther the prevailing theory would make hell an ice house in comparison with the Laurentian strata? Where does the fresh water come from admitted to exist in the bottom of the oceans? Where is the source of fresh water that abounds in the highlands of islands in all latitudes? Where does the water come from that feeds all the coral reefs and throws up atolls hundreds of miles in extent and nourishes the roots of trees and smaller vegetation? Why are the atoll inclosures filled with different varieties of fish from the ocean outside? Why are most of the great lakes at high elevations and commonly on top of divides? Why are springs more numerous all over the Earth on the hills and mountains than in the valleys? Why are the shallowest and most enduring wells on the highlands instead of the low? Why when a country is below sea level is it a desert? Why did Abraham succeed with his flocks, while Lot (as he deserved) was dried up and burnt out? Answer, Abraham was the smarter of the two, and took to the hills, where he no doubt had observed the waters lasted. Where did Moses look for water when his followers were famishing for it? He went where water can almost invariably be found, at the foot of a rocky upheaval which he discovered in Horeb. How could water be cast up from a deep artesian well, bored on a plain with no high land in sight to produce a pressure claimed in explaining their nature and reasons why they flow? Where do all the rivers found in large caves have their origin?