Article July 15, 1905 Issue

Water

M. G. KAINS.

A mountain spring has a charm for all as it bubbles up from its pebbly basin in the rocks, clear, cool, enticing. Who is not tempted to taste, and taste again? What question arises in the mind as to its purity? It comes from above, where the clouds have dropped their burden of rain and snow on the mountain crest. Thence the water finds its way through crevices in the rocks, and seeps down, down to the channel, and appears as a spring. It is pure, it cannot be otherwise.

Let us follow it in its course down the mountain. It starts, a tiny rivulet, soon to be joined by others, limpid like itself. With these it becomes a brook, gains strength to grind its rocky bed, carries sand and stones to lower levels, dissolving soluble matter which it holds, perhaps unseen. Here it forms a tiny cascade, there a pool; again it pauses in a dark, deep tarn which mirrors the clouds and the stars, still clear, cool, beautiful. Thence it passes over a clay bottom, which it rubs and tears and carries downward bit by bit. No more it tempts the thirsty; it has become sullied. In turn it serves a miller's, a manufacturer's, a city's uses. Gathering impurities, it continues its course to the sea, there to lay its burden down.

All this time it has been the same water that started from the heights. The impurities which it carries along are not a part of it. This the experimenter may prove for himself by filling a large glass tube full of muddy water, allowing it to settle for an hour or so, and then adding a few drops of lime water to the muddy liquid. Soon thereafter little particles of mud will form at the top and fall to the bottom, and the upper water will become clear. This will continue till the whole is transparent, the mud having settled at the bottom. The soluble matter is still there; but most of this may be destroyed by boiling or aëration; or, to prove that the water is unchanged in its proper self, it may be distilled. This process is final. The water is seen to be the same limpid liquid that fell from the clouds with no trace of foreign matter in it, and when it is thus rid of its impurities no one remembers or thinks of its former pollution.

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