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Page 3
Besides the precious drink the sun brought the most delicate food for
the wheat. There was carbonic acid, that makes soda water so
delicious, besides oxygen, that is so stimulating, nitrogen, ammonia,
and half a dozen other things that are so nutritious to growing plants.
Thus the wheat grew up in beauty, headed out abundantly, and matured
perfectly. Then the farmer stopped weeping for laughter, and in his
joy he remembered to thank, not the sun, nor the wind, but the great
One who made them both.
THE SUN'S GREAT HORSES
There was once a man who had thousands of acres of mighty forests in
the distant mountains. They were valueless there, but would be
exceedingly valuable in the great cities hundreds of miles away, if he
could only find any power to transport them thither. So he looked for
a team that could haul whole counties of forests so many miles. He saw
that the sun drew the greatest loads, and he asked it to help him. And
the sun said that was what he was made for; he existed only to help
man. He said that he had made those great forests to grow for a
thousand years so as to be ready for man when he needed them, and that
he was now ready to help move them where they were wanted.
So he told the man who owned the forest that there was a great power,
which men called gravitation, that seemed to reside in the center of
the earth and every other world, but that it worked everywhere. It
held the stones down to the earth, made the rain fall, and water to run
down hill; and if the man would arrange a road, so that gravitation and
the sun could work together, the forest would soon be transported from
the mountains to the sea.
So the man made a trough a great many miles long, the two sides coming
together like a great letter V. Then the sun brought water from the
sea and kept the trough nearly full year after year. The man put into
it the lumber and logs from the great forests, and gravitation pulled
the lumber and water ever so swiftly, night and day, miles away to the
sea.
How I have laughed as I have seen that perpetual stream of lumber and
timber pour out so far from where the sun grew them for man. For the
sun never ceased to supply the water, and gravitation never ceased to
pull.
This man who relentlessly cut down the great forests never said, "How
good the sun is!" nor, "How strong is gravitation!" but said
continually, "How smart I am!"
OLD SUN HELP
Holland is a land that is said to draw twenty feet of water. Its
surface is below sea level. Since 1440 they have been recovering land
from the sea. They have acquired 230,000 acres in all. Fifty years
ago they diked off 45,000 acres of an arm of the sea, called Haarlem
Meer, that had an average depth of twelve and three quarters feet of
water, and proposed to pump it out so as to have that much more fertile
land. They wanted to raise 35,000,000 tons of water a month a distance
of ten feet, to get through in time. Who could work the handle?
The sun would evaporate two inches a year, but that was too slow. So
they used the old force of the sun, reservoired in former ages. Coal
is condensed sunshine, still keeping all the old light and power. By a
suitable engine they lifted 112 tons ten feet at every stroke, and in
1848, five years after they began to apply old sun force, 41,675 acres
were ready for sale and culture.
The water that accumulates now, from rain and infiltration, is lifted
out by the sun force as exhibited in wind on windmills. They
groaningly work while men sleep.
The Netherlandish engineers are now devising plans to pump out the
Zuyder Zee, an area of two thousand square miles. There is plenty of
power of every kind for anything, material, mental, spiritual. The
problem is the application of it. The thinker is king.
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