UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 158]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871
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150 phant's hide, should find it, wherever they punctured, growing hotter and hotter, and tougher and tougher as they went in, they would know simply that fact; but if the gadfly philosophers should proceed to infer that the elephant was all a lake of tire within, or all tough hide through and through, the gadfly philosophers would surely be mistaken. I have no faith, therefore, in any deductions about climates, either in the present or the past, based on such slender supports as these, however fashionable they may become, or however sustained by illustrious names. Should it be inquired how the earth was first made, I answer, we have no proof, or even semblance of proof, from philosophy, that it ever was made at all, or that both matter and force, as well as spirit, are not eternal; and if any proof comes, it must come wholly from some other source. That the earth has been changed and refitted or recreated many times, and is undergoing the same constant changes even now, we have the fullest proofs; that it ever was non existent, substantially in its present form, we have no particle of proper proof. Perhaps these last mentioned changes of the tides, swing, flow and reflow, interfacings, dip, interaction and reaction, and swinging into line again of the great air currents, that are somewhat constant and uniform in their motions, might better be classed with mere serial than as astronomical causes, though their great motive power is in the sun. There are other serial changes, or changes of currents, which seem to proceed from mere local causes, either electrical or mechanical, or both combined—such, for example, as the effects of railroads, canals, telegraph wires, burning of forests or cities, cannonading, etc. It can hardly have escaped the notice of men somewhat advanced in life, that the frequency and severity of thunder storms has very materially abated in this country during the past twenty-five or fifty years. I t seems also to be well established that the rains on the Great American Desert have very much increased within that period, while the severity of their droughts seem to have increased in California and in regions west of this desert, and perhaps, also, on the regions east of the plains, quite to the Alleghanies. The droughts in France and Western Europe seem also to have increased in severity, while rainless Egypt is a^ain blessed and surprised with an increasing frequency of showers, much as seems to have been the fact when her old canal connected the two seas, as her new one now does. Now, all these changes, or seeming or reported changes, may be only temporary recurrent paroxysms of climate, soon to pass to the other extreme, it is true; but to one who knows the powerful part which electricity plays in the affairs of our earth, and especially in this matter of storms and rainfall, it will not