Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 14 -- Hollow Earth Geophysics
At this point it may be well to call attention to another feature in the river system. The water on
the grindstone will give force to this suggestion. At a certain speed the water will tend to the
outside of the stone; below speed required to do that, the tendency will be toward the center of
the stone, or strictly toward the center of the Earth's motion.
Now let us see what the river system says. Look on your maps and see about where the
common divide occurs, which is seemingly not far from the 50th parallel, where centrifugal force
is apparently not strong enough to carry the waters toward the Equator, and the principal
waters flow toward Symmes's Hole.
Look on your maps.
The Insufficiency of Rainfall
And while all this grand and complete arrangement supplies vegetation with its bathing and
drinking, as said before, it has nothing to do with the living and lasting supply of our springs,
lakes and rivers. They are fed from a never failing and almost unchanging source -- that is, by
the immense supply taken in at the polar holes in a river over 4,000 miles wide at each end of
the Earth's axis.
Mountaintop Springs
Within twenty rods of the top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the New England
States, flows out a copious spring of water. The whole mountain system is full of springs and
lakes. The entire Adirondack region is in the same condition. It is safe to leave it to the reader
who has ever been out of sight of the smoke of his own chimney to think of the abundance of
instances where he has seen lakes and springs on the tops of high hills, where no shed water
to any extent could reach them, and wonder how they came there.
Artesian Wells on Plains
Here is a subject that is worthy the attention of settlers in our arid and apparently desert regions
of country. We are told that the source of an artesian well is from fountains of water gathered
and stored in higher lands that run through different strata of rocks till they reach the valleys,
and when the boring reaches down to these strata the water naturally comes up toward the
height of the fountain it started from. Would it not be a sensible inquiry to make as to where the
supply came from to furnish the water in the higher lands? That the accepted theory of supply
to artesian wells comes from some higher point is not correct can be demonstrated on the
prairies, where no higher land is in sight.
The Symmes legacy seems unbounded. The man wasn't the first to imagine polar holes, but he
the popularized the possibility. In the century following his 1818 "TO ALL THE WORLD," scores
of dime novels -- of which we've listed many -- followed one fictional hero or another into the polar
entrance. Fortunately, most escaped.
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