Page:Essay on the mineral waters of Carlsbad (1835).pdf/47

 thermal temperature will not be explained as long as the place from which those ingredients proceed, remains unknown.”

The problem of animal heat has not engaged the attention of more eminent men, than the cause of the high temperature of the Carlsbad waters. Bohuslas de Lobkowitz proposed poetically that question, and, after him, a series of learned physicians, chymists, mineralogists and geologists: Frederick Hoffmann, Gottfried Berger, Bruckner, B. L. Tralles, David Becher, Klaproth, Leopold de Buch, Gilbert, Berzelius, de Hoff, offered, instead of proofs, ingenious conjectures; each pointed out the weak sides of his predecessor’s opinion, and proposed a new theory, but all acknowledged the impossibility of ascertaining the operations of that deep and mysterious boiler, anterior to history, coeval to Creation. Masses of hornstein, of sulfuret of iron, of fossil coals, imbedded in the granite of Carlsbad, volcanos, earthquakes, revolutions of the globe, comparisons between the external forms of our environs with those of such regions (France and Iceland), where hot springs are found; subterraneous electric or galvanic action; violent friction of vegetable, animal, bituminous substances, heated to ignition; erudition, sagacity, analogy, every means in short have been tried to resolve the problem of thermal temperature; but, in our dark ignorance of the anatomy and physiology of the bowels of the earth, of which we scarcely know more than the integuments, that gordian