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The changes which Daubree has shown to have been produced by the alkaline waters of Plombieres in the Vosges, are more especially instructive. They were conveyed by the Romans to baths through long conduits or aqueducts. The foundations of some of their works consisted of a bed of concrete made of lime, fragments of brick, and sandstone.
The incineration and fusion of the materials of which the vitrified forts are made, especially the granite ones of La Creuse and the Cotes du Nord, bear witness, says Daubree, to a surprising skill and knowledge of the management of fire in those who burned them, but these qualities were manifested also in extremely ancient metallurgical operations.
As for quartz, it can be produced under the influence of heat by water holding alkaline silicates in solution, as in the case of the Plombieres springs. The quantity of water required, according to Daubree, to produce great transformations in the mineral structure of rocks, is very small.
The death of this distinguished man must be recorded. An interesting resume of his labors by M. Daubree has appeared, from which we take the following facts. After a training in his native town at the Lyceum of Metz, which furnished so many scholars to the Polytechnic school, Delesse was admitted at the age of twenty to this school. In 1839 he left to enter the Corps des Mines.
At Castel-Sarrazin is a camp refuge with similar dispositions, and recently Daubree presented to the Academie des Sciences a piece of porphyry artificially vitrified from the prehistoric ENCEINTE of Hartmannswiller Kopf in Upper Alsace. It is in Scotland, however, that are situated the most remarkable vitrified forts. A few years ago no less than forty-four were counted.
From these facts and from the experiments and observations of Senarmont, Daubree, Delesse, Scheerer, Sorby, Sterry Hunt, and others, we are led to infer that when in the bowels of the earth there are large volumes of matter containing water and various acids intensely heated under enormous pressure, these subterranean fluid masses will gradually part with their heat by the escape of steam and various gases through fissures, producing hot springs; or by the passage of the same through the pores of the overlying and injected rocks.
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