What evidence from natural philosophy and exploration affected the persistence of myths regarding the sources of major rivers like the Nile?

Natural philosophy and exploration have both confirmed and challenged the myths surrounding the sources of major rivers like the Nile. While ancient philosophers and explorers such as Herodotus perpetuated myths of the Nile's mystical origins, claiming unfathomable fountains between picturesque mountains , subsequent explorers like James Bruce, Vincenzo Coronelli, and Pedro Paez provided empirical observations and mappings that grounded these narratives in reality . However, even with scientific advances, the mythical allure of such river origins continued to captivate imaginations due to their historical and cultural significances .

How did the metaphoric use of 'underground rivers' shape cultural and literary narratives?

The metaphor of 'underground rivers' has significantly shaped cultural and literary narratives by symbolizing hidden or latent forces that underpin visible phenomena. This is evident in various literary contexts, wherein the underground river represents subconscious flows, underlying traditions, or the continuity of cultural wisdom hidden from mainstream recognition . For instance, in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," the river flowing down to a sunless sea symbolizes a journey through the subconscious into the unknown, impacting poetic and narrative themes . Such imagery highlights unseen influences in cultural identity and personal introspection.

In what ways did geographic and cartographic representations of rivers and their origins evolve from ancient to early modern times?

Geographic and cartographic representations evolved dramatically from ancient to early modern times, transitioning from myth and exploration narratives to more empirical approaches. Early maps like those mentioned in Source 4 depict mythical origins of rivers, such as the Nile rising in Asia, reflecting ancient beliefs and limited exploration. By the 15th century, maps began incorporating discoveries such as Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon based on travelers' accounts and emerging scientific methods . This transformation continued with representations considering geological features and empirical data, progressively moving away from mythical associations .

What role did underground rivers play in the historical development of geological theories in the 17th century?

In the 17th century, the concept of underground rivers significantly contributed to geological theories by providing explanations for natural phenomena such as springs and the origin of river water. Thinkers like Descartes proposed the existence of cavities under mountains filled with water, where evaporation caused by the earth's heat leads to the formation of springs . Jesuit Jean François and his student René Descartes further developed the idea of subterranean caverns, suggesting that water beneath the earth exerts pressure on the crust, causing phenomena like springs . Descartes believed that seawater flowed into these caverns and contributed to the water supply of springs, a theory echoed by others like Fromondus .

In what ways have scientific beliefs about subterranean water sources differed from cultural and literary representations?

Scientific beliefs about subterranean water sources focus on empirical observations and theories, such as Descartes' model of water cycling through evaporation and condensation within Earth's geological formations , contrasting sharply with cultural and literary representations that often leverage these subterranean and underwater motifs for metaphorical purposes. Literature frequently uses underground rivers to symbolize hidden emotions, subconscious thoughts, or historical dimensions unacknowledged by mainstream culture . While scientific theories aim to provide factual explanations for geological phenomena, cultural representations exploit these same undercurrents to explore abstract human experiences and existential themes .

How did artistic interpretations of subterranean and underwater themes evolve through history?

Artistic interpretations of subterranean and underwater themes evolved significantly, adapting to new scientific discoveries and cultural meanings. Early interpretations often relied on mythological narratives, as seen in medieval maps linking subterranean water bodies with mystical realms. Over time, with increased geological understanding, artists began to integrate these ideas into more scientifically influenced representations, such as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and its subsequent visual adaptions that blend imaginative visions with emerging geological understanding of caverns and underground flows . Such artistic works explore the dualities of surface and depth, reality and myth.

What were the main scientific contributions and theories of René Descartes regarding earth's structure and water circulation?

René Descartes contributed notable scientific theories regarding the earth's structure and water circulation by proposing a model where the earth's core was sun-like, surrounded by layers including metal shells, water, and air spheres . He hypothesized that cracks in these layers allowed water from the sea to fill underground cavities, which then supplied springs through a continuous cycle of evaporation and condensation facilitated by subterranean heat . His Principle of Philosophy further elaborated on these concepts, influencing subsequent geological discussions despite his models' limitations with later discoveries like Newton's momentum theory.

How have fictional narratives utilized the motif of underground rivers to explore themes of adventure and mystery?

Fictional narratives have extensively utilized the motif of underground rivers to create themes of adventure and mystery, drawing on their associations with uncharted and hidden realms. Stories like "The Day of Creation" and "Indiana Jones and the Unicorn’s Legacy" employ these subterranean waterways to lead characters on quests that reveal new and hidden lives, obstacles, and treasures . Such settings often serve as metaphors for characters' inner journeys or the discovery of ancient secrets, heightening the drama and suspense inherent in adventure tales .

How did philosophical perspectives influence the understanding of water circulation and the structure of the earth in earlier centuries?

Philosophical perspectives greatly impacted the understanding of water circulation and earth structure by integrating metaphysical ideas with scientific observations. Aristotle's views favored natural causes and helped maintain concepts of circulation , whereas Descartes postulated a sun-like core surrounded by layers, integrating scientific reasoning into metaphysical speculation . Plato's Tartarean abyss was also adapted into quasi-scientific discourse to explain geological formations . These philosophical frameworks laid groundwork for later scientific inquiries, intertwining observational science with broader metaphysical narratives.

What scientific misconceptions were prevalent in historical theories about the nature and origins of springs and rivers?

Several misconceptions were present in historical theories regarding springs and rivers. A common belief was that underground rivers or cavities stored and transported seawater to springs, desalinating it along the way, as suggested by figures like Felix Faber . This was based on the misinterpretation that saline springs indicated a marine origin for most springs. Jacques Pelletier, while on the correct track chemically, incorrectly asserted widespread saline springs, leading to false conclusions . These misconceptions were gradually corrected with advances in hydrology and a better understanding of the water cycle.

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Underground Rivers

Underground Rivers, most every aspect thereof

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Underground Rivers

Underground Rivers, most every aspect thereof

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Richard Heggen

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Underground Rivers

from the River Styx

to the Rio San Buenaventura
with occasional diversions

Richard J Heggen
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Copyright 2009 by Richard J. Heggen

Regarding Copyright
Per the doctrine of fair use, permission is not required from copyright holders for brief quotations
or low-resolution reproduction of illustrations for non-commercial purposes.
Passages which are indented and italicized
like this
are direct quotations from source material, but may have been pruned. Apologies are due for
resultant choppiness.
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Representation of water may have been re-rendered in blue
like this.
Apologies are due for loss of graphic resolution.
Those wishing to re-utilize quotations or graphics are advised to inspect the source material.,
provided that
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Cover adapted from Journey to the Center of the Earth, Reader's Digest edition (1992), illustrated
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Underground Rivers

PROLOG
Learning of my topic, underground rivers, my sister recalled that long ago Id taught her to draw
underground worlds in ant-farm perspective. Id forgotten my artistry, but once reminded, my
subterranean creationism came to memory -- tunnels and caves in which the likes of Happy,
Grumpy, Dopey, Doc, Sneezy, Sleepy and Bashful might chorus, Hi ho, hi ho. Its off to work we
go, as they march to the diamond mine. The enterprise of course needed a few waterways?
And thered be forts and secret hideouts. Unencumbered minds are knowledgeable of such.
Grade-schoolers know of the hydrologic cycle as a wheel of evaporation, clouds, rainfall and
rivers flowing back to the sea. Geoscience textbooks add infiltration, a groundwater reserve,
seepage to springs and the role of vegetation, often citing Leonardo da Vinci as the discoverer of
it all. Actually, he wasn't, but indeed he was on the right track if we limit our look to a favorable
few of his backwards-scribed thoughts.
Unencumbered by criteria of scientific rigor, Leonardo simply recorded his ponderings, what he
believed he saw. While he envisioned a hydrologic cycle as we now know it, he likewise
conceived of a subterranean cycle spinning in reverse, one in which water flows from sea to
mountain. A divergent mind is free to venture.
I, on the other hand, as an engineering academic, was a touter of physical principals. Fluid
mechanics is obligingly law abiding.
Leonardo and I would thus seem to have had little in common, other than that he might have
appreciated my childhood art, and I, his sketches of cascading waters.
Perhaps through erroneous cataloging did The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God, A
Theme in Geoteleology (1979) by Yi-Fu Tuan end up in the University of New Mexico Centennial
Science and Engineering Library. Curiosity led me to pull the slight volume from the shelf where
it languished -- long languished, according to the due-date stamps -- amidst weighty references,
my interest at the time in kinematic waves.
"Geo," engineers know, pertains to the earth, but "teleology" wasn't in my vocabulary; it's the
philosophical study of design and purpose. Tuan's book dealt with how 17th-century Christianity
came to presume hydrologic vindication in the works of Newton. Not an engineering reference, to
be sure, but I was enchanted by the antique woodcuts.
Tuan's work -- not a quick read for one unschooled in history -- revealed to me that the subject of
hydrology -- a field in which I'd thought myself reasonably versed -- engendered intertwining
streams, streams through a world in which like Leonardo's, ideas run freer.
I thus return to my juvenile sketches of underground wonders. It's not the Seven Dwarfs' gold I
pursue, but the subterranean streams that they encounter.
Regarding the Seven Dwarfs, not until much later would
I discover that Disney's Snow White (1937) actually
contains an underground river. See Chapter 24, Girls,
Too! I shouldn't have been surprised, as such rivers
are indeed everywhere.
Richard Heggen
Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering
University of New Mexico

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Underground Rivers

INTRODUCTION
Hydrology is the study of the occurrence, distribution, movement and properties of the waters of
the earth. As water impacts so many aspects of science, we have engineering hydrology,
geohydrology, hydrogeology, geographical hydrology, environmental hydrology, fluvial
geomorphology and the list goes on.
But hydrology is more than science; it's the study of our relationship to water. We draw water to
drink, of course, but we as well draw upon water for intellectual sustenance. What would art be
without paintings of seascapes? What would poetry be without stream banks upon which to sit
and read? What would adventure be without uncharted oceans? Huckleberry Finn is about the
Mississippi and in turn, the river is about the boy.
Consider the academic departments at a university and with each, there's a tie to the words
"underground river." We engineers relish in the fluid mechanics aspect. Philosophers know of
the mythical rivers in Greek classics. Political scientists speak of underground rivers of social
change. Art historians recognize Charon, the wizened boatman, in millennia of paintings.
What would be our awareness of the unseen without allusions to subterranean streams?
And why be faint in our quest? We shall follow underground rivers wherever they lead through
Western civilization.
Our journey won't be technical, though we will encounter occasional decimal numbers, a few lines
of chemistry and a bit of physics. But we will also encounter (but only briefly, rest assured) the
likes of James Joyce. When we tire of literature, we can collect stamps. We'll add
"achluohydrophobia" to our vocabulary. We'll be the life of the party, sharing really-interesting
facts of history and geography, though we might not get invited to the next party.
Our journey's not about ports, but about pathways. We will travel underground waterways that
stray across the boundaries of co-existing, sometimes contrasting, perspectives. As do aboveground rivers, our subterranean journey may meander, diverge and reconnect. If a particular
segment fails to catch our fancy, we're free to portage onward and drift back as we like.
No serious scholar would so risk his or her credibility, of course, but the rest of us have less to
risk.
Models
Before we embark, however, we need an underlying concept, that of modeling.
To illustrate how a model works, we'll ask a basic question,
Why do underground rivers do what they do?
Consider modelings two definitional phrases: "something we wish to understand" and "something
we think we do understand." Modeling can lead us in odd ways when either is astray.
The "we wish to understand" introduces subjectivity. What sort of behavior of underground rivers
piques our curiosity? The velocity? The direction? For illustrative purpose, we'll say that our
interest is the mechanism that transports water from the sea to an upland spring. If we're
misinformed regarding the river in the first place, the answers may be legion and their content
most imaginative, but for that we must wait to Chapter 8, Subterranean Engines.
The "something we think we think we do understand" is as open ended as our capacity to host
ideas. As applied to an underground river, mechanical engineers, for example, might turn to laws
of thermodynamics. Geographers might prefer a topographic map. Scholars of the humanities
might look to literary portrayal.

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Underground Rivers
Science involves the perception of patterns that exist. Superstition involves the perception of
patterns that do not. We tend to be good at perceiving patterns, but weak in discerning the
veracity aspect. Science and superstition thus aren't as distinct as we prefer to believe.
In that light, let's imagine that Hollywood has recently entertained us with a blockbuster involving
dragons. The animated creatures seemed, in fact, quite alive. Our hypothesis is that
subterranean water is propelled from sea to springhead by a dutifully-belching reptile. We prefer
our dragon theory over, say, one utilizing a hose, because in blasting the water upward, our great
beast also consumes the salt.
To wit,
We wish to explain spring flow.
We do so by means of a dragon.
We'll express our model as a graphic.
Springs

Ocean
The boxes represent water; the upward arrow, transport. What's between is the means. It might
seem silly to bother with a drawing, but we may be thankful for such visuals in Chapters 8-10.
An errant hypothesis can be a useful step in the scientific process. A dragon would tire of a salt
diet and our sonar device yields no belching. After a bit of reflection and observation, we'll
perhaps dismiss the dragon model. We'd prefer a mechanism more satisfactory in terms of
realism, precision, generality and/or intellectual manipulability.
How about, say, we replace the dragon with a giant magnet? After all, everyone knows that
there's iron in the earth.

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iii

Underground Rivers

CHAPTERS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53

Greek Mythology
History
Greek Philosophers
History
Roman Encyclopedists
History
The Cross
History
The Crescent
History
And Back to the Cross
History
The Concept of Circulation
History
Transmutational and Biologic Engines
History
Thermodynamic Engines
History
Geophysical, Pneumatic and Electromagnetic Engines
History
Straining the Salt
History
Superterranean Metrics
History
Hydrotheology/Theohydrology
History
Fountains of the Nile
History
Hollow Earth Geophysics
Pseudoscience
The Maelstrom
Science
Underground Rivers in English Fiction
Literature
Underground Rivers in Continental Fiction
Literature
Picture Books
Literature
The Stratemeyer Boys Club Serials
Literature
More Boys Club Serials
Literature
Boys Club Singles
Literature
Boys' Life
Literature
Girls, Too!
Literature
Underground Rivers in the Comics
Popular Culture
Radio Days and Saturday Matinees
Popular Culture
Subterranean Waterbodies
Pseudoscience
Virtualizing the Imagined: Underground Rivers in Games
Entertainment
Et In Arcadia Ego
Literature and Art
The Underground River as Metaphor
Literature
Down to a Sunless Sea
Literature
Poems for Subterranean Sailors
Literature
To Cross the Styx
Literature
Twenty-Five Centuries of Subterranean Portraits
Fine Arts
Charonic Political Cartoonary
History
Underground Rivers in the Fine Arts
Fine Arts
Underground Rivers in Sound and Song
Fine Arts
Achluohydrophobia
Psychology
Hydrogeology
Science
Karstology
Science
Sinkholes
Science
Underground Rivers in Caverns other than Karst
Science
Insurgent Streams
Science
Submarine Springs and Rivers
Science
The Hydraulics of Underground Waters
Science
Siphons
Science
Reciprocating Springflow in Nature
Science
Subterranean Geophysics
Science
Finding the Underground Rivers
Pseudoscience/Science
Wrecks of Ancient Life
Science
Snotties, Floating Dumplings and Other Earthly Delights
Science
Counting the Coliforms
Science
Diversity in Darkness, Texan Ecology
Science

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Underground Rivers
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99

Subterranean Watercraft
History
Then, Madam, You Should Go and See the Great Cave in Kentucky
History
The Tourist Trade Worldwide
History/Recreation
The American Tourist Trade
History/Recreation
Chinese Electricians
Recreation
Tales of Two St. Pauls
History/Recreation
A Superfluity of Surficial Stygian Streams
Geography
Underground Rivers on Postage Stamps
Philately
The Taste Test
History/Commerce
Cargo Conveyance
History/Commerce
The Grand Tour, European Sewers of Distinction
History/Technology
Subterranean Aqueducts
History/Technology
Amusement Parks
Leisure
Damming Underground Rivers
Technology
More Hydropower from the Deep
History/Technology
The Law of Subterranean Streams
Law
Cave Diving
Personal Health
Subterranean Shipwrecks
History
Minewaters
History
Tunnels du Canal
History
More Aquatic Perils
History/Current Events
The Caspian Connection
Geography
On Some Repairs to the South American Company's Cable
History
Sub-Saharan Streamflow, the Sarasvati and Shambhala
Geography
Underground and Balkanized
Geography
The Sinking of the Fleet
History
Railroads and Incrusted Islands
History
Mainlining the Sewage
History/Environmental Science
Repercussive Urban Subversions
History
Public Access to Underground Rivers
Law
Native American Legends
Native American Studies
Beneath the Great Lakes
History
Veins of the Heartland
History
To Lie Like a Mulhatton
History
East Side, West Side, All Around the Town
History
Alligators Below
Urban Legends
Professor Denton's New England Underground River
History
General Bouton's Southern California Underground River
History
Underground Rivers of Gold
Economics
Daylighting
Environmentalism
The Rio San Buenaventura
History
Message in a Bottle
Assorted
The Paranormal
Pseudoscience
Extraterrestrials and Lost Races of the American West
Fantasy
Underground Rivers in Outer Space
Science
Why Do We Believe What We Believe?
Psychology

Although the contents intertwine, the designations at the right may assist in plotting the journey.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

CHAPTER 1
GREEK MYTHOLOGY
We begin our underground river journey with Homer (c. 800 BC), whose works -- as we will come
to see -- yet underpin Western culture.
Let us pause, however, to
recognize that the Greeks were
themselves drawing upon other
civilizations.
To the right we have from the
British Museum a bronze
Babylonian panel showing a visit
to caves near the source of the
Tigris in about 852 BC.
We see stalagmites and, in the
lower portion, an underground
river. We'll see much more of the
boatman in chapters to come.
To ancient Greeks, the underworld was not an abstraction. Their underworld -- or least its upper
layer -- was more than 10,000 limestone caverns. And where there's limestone, there's been
(and still may be) water. What humans see, they strive to explain.
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are archetypal folkloric epics of human
quest. The Iliad describes the conclusion of the Trojan War and the
Odyssey tells of Odysseus' (Ulysses in Latin) ten-year homeward
journey. Sailing his bark into the dark unknown and undertaking a
series of ordeals, the hero re-emerges as a fuller person. Odysseus
and the Sirens are illustrated on the 2500-year old vase.

Those unfamiliar with the saga can rent the video. While director Joel Cohen admits only to
having read the Classic Comics Odyssey, his and his brother Ethan's film O Brother, Where Art
Thou? (2000) faithfully replicates the tale. Following are a few correspondences.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

Odyssey (c. 855 BC)

Author
Protagonist
Setting

Opening

Characters

Rivers

Homer

Joel/Ethan Cohen

Odysseus

Everett Ulysses McGill

Mythical Mediterranean,
Mythical times

Mississippi, 1920s

Tell me, O muse, of that

ingenious hero who travelled
far and wide after he had
sacked the famous town of
Troy.

Sing in me, and through me tell

the story of that man skilled in
all the ways of contending a
wanderer, harried for years on
end.

Lotus Eaters
Cyclops
Sirens

Baptists
Bible salesman
Washerwomen

Acheron
Cocytus
Styx
Lethe
Pyriphlegethon

A river is involved at either end

-- the baptism and the flooding.

We'll make similar Odyssean comparisons in chapters to come. One can't keep a good story
down.
As enduring as the saga's hero are the deities of the world
through which he journeyed. To the right are several of the
many Greek gods, along with their Romanized names.
Though we today may be only vaguely familiar with the
particular legends, the gods of Homer live on in our common
references.
In addition to committing to written form the even-then ancient
mythology, Homer draws upon cultural memories of Bronze
Age seamen who sailed to where the Ocean River flows.

Greek

Roman

Aphrodite
Apollo
Ares
Hermes
Poseidon
Zeus
Eros
Heracles
Atlas
Cronus
Hades

Venus
Apollo
Mars
Mercury
Neptune
Jupiter
Cupid
Hercules
Atlas
Saturn
Pluto

Oceanus, the Ocean River

Oceanus was both a god and a water body. As the former, Oceanus was the eldest of the twelve
Titans (the race from which sprung humans), Oceanus did not join the dispossessed Titans
against the Olympians, but instead withdrew from the struggle doomed by Zeus thunderbolts.
With his sister Tethys, Oceanus fathered some three dozen gods, 3000 rivers and 3000 ocean
nymphs.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

Oceanus was represented as an old man of noble presence
and benevolent expression, with the horns of an ox or bull,
sometimes crab claws on his head, a long beard, a muscular
upper body and the lower torso of a serpent encircling the
earth. His attributes included a pitcher, cornucopia, rushes,
marine creatures and a scepter.
As a water body, Oceanus was the Atlantic Ocean, but not
the geographically-bounded sea we know today. Oceanus
was a river running around and the earth, which in turn was
believed to be a flat disk called Gaea, a derivative of a
prehistoric Egyptian/Babylonian account in which the god
Marduk piled dirt on a rush mat floating on primordial water.
The sun and moon rise from and descend into this stream
and only the Great Bear remains above the waters.

From the Iliad,

Deep flowing Oceanus, from which flow all rivers and every sea and all springs and deep wells.
Never mingling with the sea which it encloses, it has neither source nor mouth.
With Jove neither does King Achelous fight nor does the mighty strength of the deep-flowing
Oceanus, from which flow all rivers and every sea and all springs and deep wells.
On Oceanus' shores dwell the minute Pygmies. On the southern banks lies Elysian where the
"blameless Aethiopians" dwell in perfect happiness.
Beyond the west lies the realm of eternal and infernal darkness where vegetation is black
poplars, fruitless willows and funerary asphodel. The Afterworld, says Circe to Odysseus lies
at the extreme of the earth, beyond the vast Ocean.
As traders continued to find inhabited and fruited land where Oceanus desolation would have
been expected, however, an adjustment was called for. Connection to the infernal region must
be via another Oceanic link, perhaps one closer to home, perhaps even in Arcadia where watery
caves abound. (We will see why this is so in later chapters, but we don't want to muddle Hellenist
thought with geologic digression.)
And thus came to be known the five subterranean rivers, mythical waters, we'd like to say, but
like the gods, still very much alive.
The Cocytus, the river of lamentation
The dead who cannot pay Charon (whom we will meet shortly) must wander its banks forever.
The Lethe, the river of forgetfulness
The Lethe passes the extremity of the Elysian Fields. Those who drink of this stream forget the
past. The Eridanus (Po) was said to spring from the Elysian Fields, where Aeneas saw it
flowing. As later expressed by the Roman poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus in his epic Pharsalia,
Here Lethe's streams, from secret springs below
Rise to the light; here heavily, and slow,
The silent, dull, forgetful waters flow
The Acheron, the river of woe
Myths tend to be inconsistent regarding geography. Homer described the Acheron as the
channel into which the Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus empty. Virgil (the Roman Encyclopedist,

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

Chapter 3) described the Acheron as the source of the Styx and Cocytus. And yet others
claimed the Acheron to be a branch of the Styx.
According to others, the Acheron, turbid with mud, flows from desert places to
The Stygian marsh, or
Acherusian Lake where the souls remain until they are reborn, or perhaps,
The Grove of Persephone, the wife of Hades, whose kingdom lies further downstream.
The Styx, the river of hate, the river of unbreakable oath
The poet Hesiod (c. 750 BC) considered Styx to be the daughter of Oceanus. Comprising onetenth the volume of its parent, the Styx flows out of a rock and into a mass of broken rock
where it encircles the underworld nine times. In other accounts, the Styx passes around
Acherusian Lake and becomes the Cocytus.
We'll have more to say about the River Styx in Chapter 33, To Cross the Stys, and in Chapter
69, The Law of Subterranean Streams.
The Pyriphlegethon, the river of fire
Around the underworld runs a fence of bronze beyond which night spreads in triple line to the
Pyriphlegethon, a torrent of lava and clashing boulders. The Pyriphlegethon approaches the
edge of boiling Lake Acherusia, but does not mingle. Souls remain here until they are reborn.
A handy mnemonic: the first letters of the five rivers spell CLASP. As we'll be encountering them
over and over, it may help speed the recognition.
The five rivers oscillate from one side of the underworld to the other. As they surge to and fro,
surficial waters flow into and out of chasms, generating the sea's tides.
Tartarus, the lowest abyss beneath the earth, from where all waters originate and to where all
waters return, is as far distant from earth as earth is from the sky. An anvil falling down from
heaven would take ten days to reach the ground. An anvil falling from earth to Tartarus would
take ten days more. Homer portrayed Tartarus as an ominous realm inhabited by shadows. In
the dank, gloomy pit below the roots of the earth and sea, the dead fade into nothingness. .
Nothing is real; existence itself is but a miserable illusion.
(Note the term "abyss," a noun more ominous than "hole" or "cave." We'll deal with the idea of a
foreboding cavity within the earth's interior in many chapters to come.)
In myth closer to the present, Tartarus becomes Hades, a place of punishment for mortal sinners,
antithetic to the blessed afterlife on the Elysium Fields.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

Recalling the disagreement about the Acheron, we'll view the 19th-century map below as
someone's best guess. Pertinent names are overtyped for easier identification.

Lethe

Tartarus
Pyriphlegethon
Lake Acherusia

Cocytus

We will remap today's superterranean Arcadian watershed in Chapter 29.

To enter Tartarus, souls must cross a river, but which one? Early Greeks thought it to be the
Acheron. The Romans said it to be the River Styx or Lake Acherusia.
The Acheron
Pindar (ca. 522443 BC)
Aeschylus (c. 525-455 BC)
Euripides (ca. 480406 BC)
Plato (428-348 BC)
Callimachus (ca. 310-240
BC)
Pausanias (110-180)
Dante (1265-1321)

Both the Acheron

and the Styx
Virgil (70-19 BC)

The Styx
Propertius (ca. 45-15
BC)
Ovid (43 BC-17 AD)
Statius (ca. 45-96 AD)

We will meet many of the above in later chapters.

To muddle the lore a bit more, some accounts thought the psychopomp -- a general term for a
guide of the dead -- to be the god Phlegyas, but in the overwhelming majority, it's Charon.
In deference to the lore that's todays standard, that of Virgil, we will call it the Styx.
To this purpose, the aged and avaricious boatman, Charon, ferries those
upon whose lips has been placed the two-obol fare at cremation. As the
coin was worth less than a modern American dollar, the poor were not
excluded; at issue was preparation of the corps.

Boatman's Fee
2 obols

As fares for underground river passage have carried over into modern
life, we'll use the box format to note prices as we come upon them
throughout the remainder of our journey.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

Charon receives a fare. Hermes stands to the right.

A sarcophagus depicting Charon

The fifth century BC Greek tragedy "Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes" speaks of the voyage.
But sail upon the wind of lamentation, my friends, and about your head row with your hands'
rapid stroke in conveyance of the dead, that stroke which always causes the sacred slacksailed, black-clothed ship [of Charon] to pass over Acheron to the unseen land where Apollo
does not walk, the sunless land that receives all men.
In the course of Aeneass descent to the underworld after the Cumaean Sibyl has directed him to
retrieve the golden bough, Virgil's Aeneid (a Roman retelling of the Greek tale) describes the
ferryman.
From here [the path to the underworld] is the road that leads to the dismal waters of Acheron.
Here a whirlpool boils with mud and immense swirlings of water, spouting up the slimy sand of
Cocytus. A dreadful ferryman looks after the river crossing, Charon, appalling filthy he is, with a
bush of unkempt white beard upon his chin, with eyes like jets of fire; and a dirty cloak draggles
down, knotted about his shoulders. He poles the boat, he looks after the sails, he is all the
crew of that rust-colored ferry which takes the dead across.
Or in a more poetic translation.
There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast
A sordid god: down from his hairy chin
A length of beard descends, uncombed, unclean;
His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire;
A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire.
Although Homer makes no mention of the ancient boatman, Charon is long rooted in Greek lore,
originally probably not the ferryman, but possibly as an ancient and respected death-god. A hint
comes from Strabo's Geographia (Chapter 3) where the Roman writes of a cave in Asia Minor
that was once Charon's sanctuary, a place where priests sought his aid by dream-incubation. If
Charon indeed had formerly been a death-god, he would also have possessed an intrinsic power
of restoring life. With such power yet within him, yet denied its use by the Olympians, no wonder
he succumbed to despair. He is going nowhere but back and forth, constrained, as are we, by
the rulers of the day.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

In his tragedy Hercules Furens, Seneca (also Chapter 3) describes Charon when the boatman
tells Hercules to halt.
A rock funereal oerhangs the slothful shoals, where the waves are sluggish and the dull mere
is numbed.
This stream an old man tends, clad in foul garb and to the sight abhorrent, and ferries over the
quaking shades.
His beard hangs down unkempt.
A knot ties his robes misshapen folds.
Haggard his sunken cheeks,
Himself his own boatman, with a long pole he directs his craft.
Again and again in the chapters before us, we will meet this same boatman, always plying the
waters below.
Geographical Correspondences
The map locates
Epirus, Arcadia
and the
Peloponnesian
Peninsula where
limestone
formations of
Peloponnesus
exhibit numerous
watery grottos,
giving rise to
classical
documentation of
rivers swallowed
into un-plumbable
caverns and
breaking forth
elsewhere.

Epirus
Arcadia
Peloponnesian
Peninsula

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

In the table below are several purported correspondences between waters of the Greek
underworld and today's geography.
Underworld

Modern Geography

Lethe

Oblivion

Springs
near Krya
(northwest
of Athens),
location of
the Oracle
of
Trofonios

Acheron

Tar with iron plates floating

upon it

Thesprotia,
southern
Epirus

Styx

Circling Tartarus nine times

Mavroneri
("black water")
in Arcadia,
famous for its
300-m waterfall,
the highest in
Greece. Visiting
in 1895, Sir
James Frazer
remarked of
black waters
running down
cliffs of dark
rock like walls of
"ebon hue."

Pyriphlegethon

River of fire

One of many Mediterranean lava flows

(Chapter 42)

Recalling the CLASP mnemonic, we note that of the several subterranean rivers of Greek myth,
only the Cocytus hasn't -- at least nominally -- made its way to the surface.
The lower Acheron valley illustrates the metamorphosis of the Peloponnesian landscape. In
ancient times the river formed Lake Acherusia, a locale legendarily associated with Charon. The
rivers Cocytus and Vouvos (then called Pyriphlegethon) also emptied into the lake, and then all
together emptied into the vast Glukys Himen ("Sweet Harbor") noted by Strabo (Chapter 3) and
mentioned by Thucydides during the stop of the fleet of the Corinthians the day before the naval
battle of Syvota (433 BC).
The following four-millennia chronology of the valley is adapted from "The Lower Acheron River
Valley, Ancient Accounts and the Changing Landscape," Hesperia Supplements 32, 2003, by
Mark Besonen, George Rapp and Zhichun Jing.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

The Ionian Sea is to the left. Today's River Acheron is the channel sweeping from the upper
right. Drainage works have reduced Strabo's great Sweet Harbor to the snug moorage of Argo
Janni at the Acheron mouth.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

As the lore of Charon preceded Lake Acherusia's formation, the ancient ferryman didn't ply the
lacustrine surface, but then again, the river flowed long before.
What keeps classicists occupied, of course, is connecting the dots. Let us summarize a bit of
how this works. From James Henry Skene, "Remarkable Localities on the Coast of Epirus,"
Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 18, 1848,
I had occasion recently to sail into the port of Agio Janni in a small yacht, during a dark night,
and blowing hard with violent squalls. In beating into the harbor I was astonished to perceive
the sea become suddenly as calm as a mirror, although the wind was increasing, but the
calmness lasted only for a moment, and had the appearance as if a few barrels of oil had been
emptied over the waves in a particular spot. It was too late that night to make any investigation
into the causes of this, but on the next morning I returned with a light breeze in search of the
spot, and found a circular space of perfectly smooth water, the diameter of which might be
about 40 feet; and it appeared to be raised above the surface of the surrounding sea. The
water rose from beneath with such violence as to form a series of small circular waves beyond
the ring diverging from the center, which was turbid, and bubbled up like a spring. We steered
across it, and found that the cutter's head swerved about as in a whirlpool, which convinced me
that it was occasioned by a powerful submarine source, or perhaps the outlet of one of the
Katabothra, or subterranean channels, which flow out of the lake of Jannina.
Now Pausanias mentions the fact of these phenomena existing on the coast of Argolis, and in
Thesprotia, near the place called Chimerium.
Skene now cites the day's authority on all things Greek, Col. William M. Leake. From Leake's
Travels in the Morea II (1830),
This is a copious source of fresh water rising in the sea, at a quarter of a mile from a narrow
beach under the cliffs. The body of fresh water appears to be not less than fifty feet in
diameter. The weather being very calm this morning, I perceive that it rises with such force as
to form a convex surface, and it disturbs the sea for several hundred feet around. In short, it is
evidently the exit of a subterraneous river of some magnitude, and thus corresponds with the
Deine of Pausanias [a second century traveler whom we'll encounter in Chapter 3], who
remarks in the Arcadics, that the waters of the plain in the Mantinice... flow towards a chasm,
and that, after a subterraneous course, they re-appear at the Deine, towards the place in the
Argolis called Genethlium; here sweet water rises out of the sea in the same manner as near

Cheimerium in Thesprotis.
Skene thus concludes,
These two phenomena, therefore, strongly resemble each other, and they may well be
mentioned by the ancient geographer as being similar. The modern geographer [once more
referring to Leake], in his travels in Northern Greece, says himself that if the remark of

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

Pausanias were verified, he states that fresh water, similar to that of the Deine on the coast of
Argolis, rose in the sea near Chimerium..., there would remain no doubt on the subject.
Scholar A cites earlier scholar B who in turn cites ancient scholar C. Parallels between Greek
myth, ancient travelers and personal observation put Skene's doubt to rest and voila! -- the
ancient Acheron -- the above-ground part, that is -- is reconciled with modernity.
What interests us more than which ancient swamp is what current river, however, is the nature of
the supposed underground watercourse popping up in the diminished bay. Were this the case,
there would two Rivers Acheron, one subtending the other.
At the risk of dampening historic sleuthing, we must note
that actual geo-science -- the kind that employs
thermometers and such -- knows of no such sub-oceanic
upwelling. Yachters need not fear a "convex surface" off
the sunbather-spread white sands.

Pausanias appears to have swayed the colonel with an honored yarn and the latter likewise
planted a seed in Skene's expectations.
Seek, and ye shall find, as it says in the Bible. As the chapters ahead will attest, underground
rivers seem to thus be identified. Leake would have planted (or re-planted, as it were) many such
literary predispositions, as his Travels in Northern Greece (1835) contains no less than 60
references to the "subterraneous."

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

As for correspondence to legendary sites, the map below shows modern Lake Pheneus as the
grain-shaped water body near the center, said to be the excavation of Hercules.

Styx
Asopus

Lake
Pheneus
Ladon

Inachus

The Styx (one of several, as we'll see in Chapter 60, A Superfluity of Surficial Stygian Streams),
Asopus, Inachus and Ladon (tributary to the westerly Alpheus) encircle Lake Pheneus. Only from
a topographic map can we have confidence in a river's direction, or alternatively, given a
particular reach of water, can we be sure of to which basin it belongs. Only in recent mapping
was it determined that the Ladon drains the region through the underlying limestone.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

Nearby this Styx lies the Monastery Mega
Spiel, founded in 362 upon a grotto, and Limn
Kastrion Cave, 3 kilometers of underground
lakes linked by waterfalls.
The photo shows one of many nearby caverns.
If there was an entrance to the underworld, this
Arcadian region looks to qualify.

Basins such as these keep modern hydro-cartographers employed and -- as we will see in
Chapters 20-26 -- likewise the writers of pulp fiction.
To confuse an early geographer reliant on oral accounts, there are no less than three Asopus
rivers:
The Asopus above,
The Asopus of Boeotia, northwest of Athens, emptying into the Euboean Gulf, and
The Asopus on the Anatolian uplands of Sakarya, modern Turkey.
Sophocles said that the Inachus of Akarnania in Epirus joined the Inachus of the Argolis.
Strabo (Chapter 3, Roman Geographers) saw the nomenclature problem of colonists transferring
familiar names to make the new land seem more like the old.
Hecataeus ... says that the Inachus of the Amphilochi, which flows from Mount Lacmus, from
whence also the Aeas descends, was distinct from the river of like name in Argolis.
To geographers working from orally-derived accounts, however, like-names may have been
thought to be re-emerged reaches of a single watercourse.
Here's the summary of a tale older than geography itself, however.
Asopus, god of the Peloponnean River and son of Oceanus, was married to Metope, daughter of
river-god Ladon. Asopus' siblings included Acheron, Alpheus, Inachus, Styx and Maeander -- the
latter etymologically recognizable today as a riverine pathway. Asopus and Metope had twenty
daughters, several of which were carried off by other gods.
The daughters of river deity -- and not insignificantly, nieces to gods of underground waters -- are
kidnapped to distant lands. Any reasonable Greek would of course expect to come upon them in
his travels.
We thus have
Underground rivers inexorably woven into ancient, but flexible, myth,
Contorted fluvial geomorphology and altered names, and
Rivers observed to disappear into or rise from the ground.
What particular watercourse was denoted by a certain name at a given time may never be clear.
What is clear, however, is that myth, geography and mysterious waters are already intermeshed.
In Springs and Wells in Greek and Roman Literature, Their Legends and Locations (1922),
James Smith proposes that Homer's inspiration for Hades was drawn not from the Hellenist
terrain, but rather from the world's western edge, Spain. Homer would have had hearsay
knowledge of the River Tartessus, its modern name, the Guadalquivir.

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Chapter 1 -- Greek Mythology

Rising in the Sierra Cazorla Mountains, the Tartessus, according to Smith,
Soon developed a liking for darkness and frequently disappeared underground, coming as
often again to light, but none the brighter after its burrowings through the discoloring soil; and at
the end of its 360 mile course it poured dark and muddy streams into the Atlantic Ocean.
Its lightless underground courses, all combined to make the borders of the Atlantic much more
appropriate as a site for Hades than any of the other places that were suggested near the heart
of Greece, places that were only relatively west to by no means a small part of the world for
whom Homer sang his story.
While the bases of Homer's geographic conceptions will be long debated, the qualitative
correspondence seems sound that a significant portion of the poet's inspiration for Hades came
from his awareness -- albeit legendary and fragmentary -- of rivers that truly run underground.
We've begun our journey in mythical Greece, the source which, among other things, named our
planets, gave us Cupid, Chaos, Eros, Hades, the word "ocean," the Olympics. Underground
rivers are very much a part of that legacy.
As the Greeks were only one of many cultures with mythology pertaining to the underground,
however, we could have begun with subterranean tales from the Scandinavians, Tetons, Celts
and Welsh, the Chinese and Japanese, the Arabs and Central Asians, the Native Americans, the
Amazonians, Aztecs and Incas, the Australian aborigines, the Bengals and Burmese, the
Micronesians, Melanesians and Malaysians, the Persians, the Buddhists and the Hindus.
Although we direct our interests toward Western culture, we must note that both myth and
philosophy filtered across the Euro-Asian landmass. Sanskrit scripture written between the 16th
and seventh century BC instructs,
These eastern rivers, dear son, flow along to the east and the western ones to the west. They
arise from the ocean and merge into the ocean and become that ocean itself. -- Chandogya
Upanishad, 6.10.1-2
Arise from the ocean sounds very much like evaporation, and if so, the Hindus had a 3,000-year
lead in the field of hydrology.
In Sumerian tradition, Enki was Snake Lord of the Abzu (Greek "abyssos," English "abyss"). His
ziggurat temple, surrounded by Ephratean marshlands, was the E-engura, the "house of the
subterranean streams."
But as we must sail onward, we can only tip our hats to the Snake Lord before we move to
philosophy.

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Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers

CHAPTER 2
GREEK PHILOSOPHERS
Let's begin this chapter -- the title of which simply replaces "Mythology" with "Philosophers," but
it's still Greek -- with a summary of our journey to this point. We embarked into a shadowy
underworld of murky and ill-defined rivers destined for perhaps nowhere. And as we know from
Greek myth, the gods who rule such things can be rather capricious. An inauspicious start.
But there are lanterns ahead!
The Greeks' pivotal contribution to Western civilization was not the family of remembered deities.
Nor was it the yet-retold epic tales of human fete. The greatest contribution was that of a natural
philosophy, by which we mean the scholarly discipline that in ancient and medieval times pursued
an orderly investigation of our physical world. The field today is called science, as
contemporary philosophers have come to be seen -- perhaps incorrectly, but we're talking about
public perception -- as contemplators of the intangible.
The intellectual challenge in Hellenist times was that of recognizing the patterns. As contrasted in
the Introduction, whether such determination is "scientific" or "superstitious" can only be judged
by one who knows reality. Most of us today have an inviolate, physically-based bias in the
matter, of course, but well not impose our predilections on those 2,000 years before us.
We will draw most of this chapter's illustrations from Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle
(1493), the German reference of its time regarding matters classical. While we rather doubt that
the ancient Greeks dressed as Teutonic burgomasters, the drawings serve a larger point, a
theme we will again and again encounter in our journey. As cultural creatures, we're forever
regarbing past beliefs.
Born in Miletus (now part of Turkey), our first three Hellenist philosophers were Milesians, the
etymological source of millers." It's doubtful that these three ground grain, however, as they
weren't slaves.
Thales of Miletus (624-546 BC) is best remembered for his prognosis
of a solar eclipse. Likely having traveled to Egypt where eclipses were
long chronicled and observing that a year contains 365, not 360, days
probably accounted for his accuracy.
Thales was a monist, one believing that all substance is derived from a
single primordial matter. To Thales, the world was water, the only
substance having solid, liquid and gaseous form. Moreover,
nourishment for both plants and animals is moist. Water is thus an
image of a cosmic unifying power. (Note the qualification,
"image of," however. We'll see how Plato institutionalized the
concept of duality later in this chapter.)
Sidestepping religious tradition, Thales concentrated on natural processes. "All things
being full of gods," supported both religious lore and a physical River Oceanus flowing
unceasingly around the earth. Under the effect of winds, waters of the seas were thrust towards
the interior, elevating the pressure within and causing underground rivers to erupt through
earthquake in the earth's skin.
Hydrologists think of Thales as the water-philosopher, but in larger picture, it was this philosopher
who argued that for every observable effect, there is a physical cause. The term "physical" marks
the onset of what we know today as "science."

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Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers

Thales' disciple Anaximander of Miletus (611-547 BC) went a
further step, seeing the primordial substance as apeiron, a
substance less tangible. Realizing that the earth was curved,
Anaximander concluded the earths shape to be that of a cylinder,
but one placed within in a celestial sphere.
To the right, Anaximander holding a sundial

Anaximenes of Miletus (585-525 BC), said to be the first to

distinguish between stars and planets, argued that world is
composed of neither water nor apeiron, but of air itself.
Compressed, it becomes water and earth.

Anaximenes reverted to the disk cosmology, stating that the sun

never goes under the earth, but circles it laterally, sometimes
obscured by higher parts. The sea is,

The source of the water and the source of the wind. For neither could the force of the wind
blowing outwards from within come into being without the great main sea, nor the streams or
rivers, nor the showery water of the sky, but the mighty main is the begetter of clouds and
winds and rivers.
Anaximenes explained landforms as the product of surficial collapse, a rational fitting well with the
Arcadian multitude of caves. Water percolates the earth, as "in certain caves water drips down."
Not satisfied with explanations reliant on a supernatural where the eye cannot peer, the Three
Milesians proposed physical, autonomous theory. If Bertrand Russells reflection, It is not what
a man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it, in A History of
Western Philosophy (1945) yet stands, the field of natural science was born in Milet.
Underground rivers (or anything physical, for that matter) are not manifestations of arbitrary
powers, but are orderly, consistent and objective outcomes of natural rules.
Xenophanes of Colophon (570-470 BC) merits mention in our
chronology.
The sea is the source of the waters and the source of the winds.
Without the great sea, not from the clouds could come the flowing
rivers.
Xenophanes was onto something remarkable, that the waters of the
earth are interdependent. He, of course, wasn't the first to recognize
the link, but he was among the first to record the tie as a natural
dependency, not as divine whim.

As we shall note in Chapter 4, The Cross, however, subsequent theological doctrine and
uncritical observation will for another two millennia cite similar declarations to justify the uphill flow
of underground rivers.

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Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers

Heraclitus of Ephesus (540-475 BC) added the temporal dimension
to questions of hydrology. No man can twice step into the same
river isnt just about rivers, of course, but about development and
decay, a causal chain for waters perpetual mobility.

Heraclitus noted the following.

The sun is a bowl, the concave side turned towards us, in which the bright exhalations from the
sea collect and burn.
The vapor, after kindling and going out again, reappears as dark clouds and fiery water spouts
resembling smoke and comes down as water.
As the sea is increased by rain, water passes into the earth.
As the sea is diminished by evaporation, the earth is proportionally liquefied.
At any moment, half of the sea is taking the downward path, having just been a fiery storm
cloud, while half of it is going up, having just been earth.
We're not told the means, but we can draw a schematic.
Springs

Ocean

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (500-428 BC) lived in Athens until

being accused of heresy for asserting that the sun is not a god.
Anaxagoras envisioned percolated rainfall gathered in subterranean
caverns, hydrologys first reservoir theory.
Rivers depend for their existence on the rains and on the water
within the earth, as the earth is hollow and has water in its
cavities.

The substratum rests on ether, the lightest of all elements, which in streaming upward, entrains
cavern-trapped rain water and caries it to springheads. Streams that cease flowing in summer
are fed from reservoirs too small to store enough water. Differing from Heraclitus, no new water
is generated within the earth.

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Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers

Here's a schematic version of Anaxagoras' model.
Springs

Ether

Ocean
If the porous upper stratum is plugged by downpours, the ether may exit forcibly as an
earthquake.
Democritus (460-370 BC) held that the world was round and was
composed of tiny atoms. His cosmology can be summarized by
words from the poet Percy Shelley (1792-1822).
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river
Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

We will later turn to Democritus to explain how "salt" atoms might drive underground fresh-water
rivers to mountain springs.
Hippo of Samos (c. 450 BC) wrote that all rivers, springs and wells have their source in the ocean
because the sea is the deepest, a unifying physical explanation for hydrologic linkage. While
invalid in light of modern hydrostatics, we're more-and-more seeing a logic that's turning toward
physical law.
Like his mentor Socrates (470-399
BC), Plato (428-348 BC) dismissed
truth by observation, seeing form
as the essence that relates to with
what it participates. Platos
universe is the product of divine
intelligence, the Demiurge, the
personification of reflection and
reason. Physical experiment is but
a base art.

As did his teacher, Plato found little problem in reverting to folklore for questions of mere
substance. Platos Timaesus tells of Atlantis, larger than Asia and Libya together, located on the
far side of the Pillars of Hercules (modern Gibraltar). He visited Sicily in 387 BC to view Mt. Etna

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Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers

which eleven years before had produced one of its greatest eruptions (Chapter 3), but Plato's
thoughts did not stoop to geology. If anything, the devastation cemented Platos reliance on the
supernatural.
Timaesus also furthered the paradigm of microcosm and macrocosm, a world view to persist for
another 2000 years. To understand the cosmos, we need only know the anatomical,
physiological and psychological structure of man. We'll see the implications for underground
rivers in Chapter 8, Transmutational and Bilological Engines.
The schematic suggests how Socrates and Plato would have viewed the flow of springs.

invisible

Underworld

Springs

Ocean

Rivers

visible
The Platonic Hydrologic Cycle
Re-label Springs as Craters and note that Etnean lava flowed as rivers to the sea and the
upward arrow becomes the River Pyriphlegethon. In the case of water, Plato's visible portion is
correct. It is in the unseen portion where arrows are misdirected that has come to be known as a
reversed hydrologic cycle.
In Phaedo, Plato speculates,
Some (rivers] flow in on the opposite side from where they came out, and others on the same
side, while some make a complete circle, and winding like a snake... round the earth, descend
as far as possible before they again discharge their waters
Note his use of "wider channels" from the same source, what seem to be river-like passageways.
But all these are in many places perforated one into another under the earth, some with
narrower and some with wider channels, and have passages through, by which a great quantity
of water flows from one into another, as into basins, and there are immense bulks of everflowing rivers under the earth, both of hot and cold.
In Critias, written some years later, Plato refers to the Athens region in former times.
[Rainwater was] not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but ... , storing
it up in the retentive loamy soil, and by drawing off into the hollows from the heights the water
that was there absorbed, it provided all the various districts with abundant supplies of springwaters and streams.
Perhaps recounting ancient Athens through the voice of Critias freed Platos mind to ponder more
of the mundane.
He [Plato] says that they all flow into each other beneath the earth through channels pierced
through it, and that their original source is a body of water in the center of the earth called
Tartarus, from which all waters running of standing are drawn. This primary and original mass
causes the flow of various rivers by surging perpetually to and fro; for it has no fixed position
but is always oscillating about the center, and its motion up and down fills the rivers. Many of
them form lakes, one example of which is the sea by which we live, but all of them pass round
again in a circle to the original source from which they flowed; many return to it again at the

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Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers

same place, others at a point opposite to that of their outflow, for instance if they flowed out
from below, they return from above.
Plato identifies Tartarus as the underworld's lowest abyss because it pierces through the whole
earth. Repeating Anaxagoras, all waters begin in Tartarus and endlessly journey to return to their
Tartarean source. Water does this because a liquid has no bottom or foundation; hence, it
oscillates up and down as do air and winds. Points of egress and ingress may be close together
or far apart.
That much said, however, we must note that Plato identified little with Homer's world view. As
reality is something else, the latter's version about Tartarus was good enough. Had not Aristotle - concerned with worldly things more than was than Plato -- not quoted his teacher as a basis for
further discussion, we'd not have Plato's reference to the myth. Plato, we must suppose, wasn't
arguing for the folklore's veracity as much as he was summarizing popular belief.
Platos successors as head of his Academy, Speusippus and Xenocrates, deemed in turn that
mathematics was the highest level of existence, even primary to soul. We can only speculate if
such metaphysics might have segued into quantifiable science had not the Romans sacked the
Academy in 86 BC.

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Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers

At age 17, Aristotle (384-322 BC) enrolled in the Academy where
the master soon called him the "mind of the school." Aristotle
remained at the Academy until Plato's death, after which Aristotle
became a teacher himself, spending two years studying marine
biology on Lesbos where he recognized dolphins as mammals.

Italian Banknote, The School of Athens by Raphael (1483-1520)

Plato and Aristotle stand at the center. Plato (on the left) is
modeled after da Vinci, another underground-river scholar with
whom we will come to be relentlessly acquainted in Chapter 7,
The Concept of Circulation.

An equally-unlikely
representation of Aristotle,
Andr Thevet's Les Vrais
Pourtraits et Vies Hommes
Illustres (1584). The
philosopher in
Reminiscence garb may
not be that far-fetched,
however, as he'd only
grown more popular.

In contrast to Plato's emphasis on the abstract, Aristotle's reality was derived through the senses.
The world is comprised of individuals grouped into fixed kind -- speciation to a modern biologist.
Each individual has an inherent pattern of development toward a group-defined self-realization.
Growth, purpose, and direction are thus built into nature. Humankinds purpose is to reason.
Zoology rested on Aristotle's foundation until Charles Darwin disputed the fixity of species in
1859.
The earth and the heavens are subject to unlike natural laws -- earthly things are changeable and
corrupt, while the heavens are permanent. The regenerative process keeps the decaying earth in
equilibrium within an eternal universe. Natures purpose is to maintain balance and Aristotles
interest was that of finding the predefined function teleology each component.
Matter is of four sensible qualities: cold, hot, wet and dry. We will see the geophysical
implications of transmutation in Chapter 8; it opens up a multitude of explanatory possibilities.
Aristotles factor of tens (decuplo) established that proportionality 1:10:100:1000 for earth,
water, air and fire, respectively.

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Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers

Aristotle criticized Platos subterraneous reservoir theory, noting that Tartarus would have to be
impossibly large.
But if anyone will picture to himself a reservoir adequate to the water that is continuously
flowing day by day, and consider the amount of water, it is obvious that a receptacle that is to
contain all the water that flows in the year would be larger than the earth, or, at any rate, not
much smaller.
Aristotle likewise rejected that streamflow was generated in upland lakes.
The fact that rivers have their sources at the foot of the mountains proves that the place
accumulates water little by little by a gradual collection of drops, and that the sources of rivers
are formed this way. It is of course not at all impossible that there do exist such places
containing large amounts of water, like lakes; but they cannot be so large as to act in the way
this theory maintains, any more than one could reasonably suppose that their visible sources
supply all the water for the rivers, most of which flow from springs. It is thus equally
unreasonable to believe either that lakes or that the visible sources are the sole water supply.
Aristotle recognized that vapor from marine evaporation causes rainfall.
Now the sun, moving as it does, sets up processes of change and becoming and decay, and by
its agency the finest and sweetest water is every day carried up and is dissolved into vapor and
rises to the upper region, where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth.
He likewise recognized the principle of a hydrologic cycle.
For according as the sun moves from side to side, the moisture in this process rises and falls.
We must think of it as a river flowing up and down in a circle and made up partly of air and
partly of water.
Aristotle looked upon cool mountains as the site of direct condensation. The water so condensed
was then held by then like water in saturated sponges to be gradually released in springs.
The process is rather like that in which small drops form in the region above the earth, and
these join again others, until rain water falls in some quantity; similarly inside the earth, as it
were, at a single point, quantities of water collect together and gush out of the earth and form
the sources of rivers. A practical proof of this is that where men make irrigation works they
collect the water in pipes and channels, as though the higher parts of the earth were sweating it
out.
Similarly, the majority of springs are in the neighborhood of mountains and high places, and
there are few sources of water in the plains except rivers. For mountains and high places act
like a thick sponge overhanging the earth and make the water drip through and run together in
small quantities in many places. For they receive the great volume of rain water that falls... and
they cool the vapor as it rises and condense it again to water.
The question becomes, from where does such water rise?
According to Aristotle, it rises from both below and above the earth. Keeping in mind that
Aristotle did not distinguish between air and water vapor,
It is unreasonable for anyone to refuse to admit that air becomes water in the earth for the
same reason that it does above it.
The air surrounding the earth is turned into water by the cold of the heavens and falls and
rain... The air which penetrates and passes the crust of the earth also becomes transformed
into water owing to the cold which it encounters there. The water coming from the earth unites
with rainwater to produce rivers. The rainfall alone is quite insufficient to supply the rivers of the
world with water.

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Chapter 2 -- Greek Philosophers

Let us reduce Aristotle's thoughts to a schematic, a much enhanced of the earlier one done for
Heraclitus.
Clouds
Evaporation
Precipitation
Ocean

Land

Condensation

Rivers
Springs

Mountain Caverns
Aristotle's Hydrologic Cycle
Had Greek thought continued to advance, we can only speculate that the scientific realizations of
the 17th century might have occurred much earlier. But were that the case, we'd be already
approaching the end of our journey, and in counting the pages, we're not even close.
In the first chapter, we floated through the Greek underworld with little hope or comprehension.
The philosophers of this chapter haven't made our journey a pleasant excursion, but they've
admirably argued for an underlying order to the flow.
We keep in mind the nagging fact that in our journey so far, none of the pundits have themselves
seen the waters of which we speak.
Perhaps what we need are some able note-takers, scholars who'll help us find a pattern in the
fluvial underground. With that in mind, let's go to Rome.

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

We title this chapter "Encyclopedists" because Rome's contribution to knowledge of underground

rivers largely derives from a mindset. The Roman intellectuals task wasn't to ponder, but rather
to harvest. As the journey before us, we're not ourselves conceiving ideas about underground
rivers; we're grouping what we find into a sequence of chapters.
We'll begin our Roman review with a reminder that the Latin starting point, while by no means
one based in science, was well-footed in physical observation. We find the rainfall-runoff
correspondence in the odes of Horace (65-27 BC) celebrating of the Greek poet Pindar (522BC).
Like to a mountain stream rushing down in fury,
Overflowing the bunks with its rain-fed current,
Pindar's torrent...
Engineer Marcus Vitruvius' (80-20 BC) greatest contribution
to the Cesar's empire was not constructed works, but rather
his ten-volume De Architectura, the eighth volume being De
Aquis et Aquaeductu. A technology-laden page from the
1567 edition is shown to the right, testament to the lasting
power of the book.
Our interests, however, pertain more to Vitruvius' allusions
to rivers beneath the earth's surface. As in a hot bath,
according to De Aquis, waters on the earth are heated by
the sun to form vapors and clouds which when they impact
the mountains,
Swell, and become heavy, break and disperse
themselves on the earth. The vapors, clouds and
exhalations which rise from the earth seem to depend on
its retention of inner heat, great winds, cold moisture and
large proportion of water. Then when from the coolness
of the night, assisted by darkness, winds arise and clouds
are formed in damp places, the sun, at its rising, striking
on the earth with heat power, and thereby heating the air,
raises its vapors and dew at the same time.
Vitruvius describes the amount and taste of water which might be found in different soils and
notes how mountain snowfall issues forth as springs.
The trees which grow in great numbers in the mountains contribute to the accumulation of snow
during long periods, after which it begins to slowly percolate beneath the soil, and this same
water, once infiltrated, arrives at the foot of the mountains, the location of springs.
What we quote is reasonably correct, but doesn't move to reasons. Had Vitruvius cited a
principal such as gravity, for example, subsequent natural philosophers might have had more
doubt about a route from the sea to the feet of mountains.
Strabo (63 BC-24 AD), master of Greek literature, traveler and philosopher, is best known for his
17-volume Geographia, a geographical compilation from works that largely have not survived.
Strabo attributed the fire of Mt. Etna and of the volcanic island Thermessa to combustion because
when the winds die, so do the flames. The wind is in turn fueled by evaporation from the sea.
Incorrect, we might judge, but at least there's a hint of the type of causality espoused by the
natural philosophers from whom he was drawing.
Strabo reported the Cave of the Sibyl within the Phlegraean Fields in the sulfurous caldera of
Mt. Vesuvius near modern Naples, exactly the type of clue that fuels archeologists. Discovery in
the 1960s of a hewn tunnel descending 40 meters in hot rock to an artificial channel going

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

nowhere may have resolved the question. The layout conforms to Virgil's description in the
Aeneid of Aeneas' journey to the underworld. Quoting from the Smithsonian.com October 1,
2012 feature, "The Unsolved Mystery of the Tunnels at Baiae,"
[The tunnel system may have] been constructed by priests
to mimic a visit to the Greeks mythical underworld. In this
interpretation, the stream represented the fabled River
Styx, which the dead had to cross to enter Hades; a small
boat, the explorers speculated, would have been waiting at
the landing stage to ferry visitors across. On the far side
these initiates would have climbed the stairs to the hidden
sanctuary.
The tunnels... might have been constructed to allow priests
to persuade their patrons -- or perhaps simply wealthy
travelersthat they had traveled through the underworld.
The scorching temperatures below ground and the thick
drifts of volcanic vapor would certainly have given that
impression. And if visitors were tired, befuddled or perhaps
simply drugged, it would have been possible to create a
powerfully otherworldly experience capable of persuading
even the skeptical.
We'll have more to say about Leonardo da Vinci's and Athanasius Kircher's interest in Mount
Vesuvius in Chapter 9 (Thermodynamic Engines).
Lime-laden geothermal streamlets lace the cliffs above of
ancient Hierapolis, today's Pamukkale in southwestern
Turkey. In Greco-Roman times, a cave known as Pluto's
Gate -- Plutonion in Latin -- was celebrated as the portal
to Hades. Pilgrims sacrificed birds in the lethal gasses -mostly carbon dioxide -- emitting from the cave mouth.
The site's temple was protected from the gas by allowing
it to escape through gaps between the paving stones.
Artist's reconstruction of ancient site

Strabo made mention of Pluto's Gate in Geographia.

This space is full of a vapor so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Any
animal that passes inside meets instant death... I threw in sparrows and they immediately
breathed their last and fell.
Asclepiodotus, c. 500 AD, mentioned the hot stream inside the cavern. Functional until the fourth
century, the temple was destroyed by Christians in the sixth century.
Today, the 34-degree C effluent precipitates avulsing lime-walled channels 30 centimeters in
width and up to 2 meters in depth. The cavern is large enough to allow just one person to
descend to its 3-square-meter chamber under which noxious thermal water can be seen in a cleft
in the rock. Fumes from the cavern still maintain their deadly toll in birds attracted by the warm
air.
Strabo was the recorder of many lost river accounts, among them, the loss of the Timavo east
of Trieste in a cavern and its reappearance at the coast -- a river we'll travel in Chapter 78,
Underground and Balkanized. Another lost river is the subject of Chapter 29, Et In Arcadia Ego

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

Erasmus which now flows underground from the Stymphalian Lake and issues forth into the
Argive country, although in earlier times it had no outlet, since the berethra [pits] which the
Arcadians call "zerethra" were stopped up and did not admit of the waters being carried off.
And yet another lost river reported by Strabo is the Nile, itself, subject of Chapter 14.
A lost river story rejected by Strabo is one in which "the mouth of the river empties into the sea in
full view and there is no mouth [whirlpool] on the transit, which swallows it up."
Although Strabo noted what were said to be lost rivers, his encompassing geographical
compilation -- his lasting contribution -- showed none.

Strabo's Geographia notes what may have been a geographical root of Charon.
One comes to a village [in Karia, Asia Minor], the Karian Thymbria, near which is Aornon, a
sacred cave, which is called Charonion, since it emits deadly vapors.
Strabo mentioned that Lake Copais north of the Peloponnese was drained naturally by an
underground channel some 5 kilometers in length which rose again near Larymna.
From Herodotus' Persian Wars (c. 435 BC),
When Cleomenes had sent to Delphi to consult the oracle, it was prophesied to him that he
should take Argos; upon which he went out at the head of the Spartans, and led them to the
river Erasinus. This stream is reported to flow from the Stymphalian lake, the waters of which
empty themselves into a pitch-dark chasm, and then (as they say) reappear in Argos, where the
Argives call them the Erasinus.
Drawing upon this, Strabo described a subterranean connection between the River Stymphalus
(and, by extension, Lake Stymphalus) and the Argive River Erasinus, placing the river's
emergence at a spring between Argos and Lerna. We'll have more to say about the area's
hydrology in Chapter 29, Et In Arcadia Ego.
Strabo stated that at one time the sink was blocked by an earthquake, making the lake much
larger. Citing the authority Eratosthenes (c. 275-194 BC), Strabo noted that the sink occasionally
plugged, causing flooding near Pheneus and a flood surge downstream.

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

During the Battle of Mantinea, 418 BC, the Spartans were said to have flooded the path of their
enemies by diverting the River Sarandapotamos to the bed of the smaller River Zanovistas and
plugging the latter's sinkholes.
In like manner, when Iphicrates was besieging the Spartan town of Stymphalus some years later,
it was said that he attempted to inundate the defenses by blocking the sink with sponges.
The Stymphalus was said by Diodorus of Sicily, writing between 56 and 36 BC, to descend
underground through a sinkhole, flow 32 kilometers through underground passages, and
resurface before emptying into the Gulf of Argos.
According to Strabo's Geographia, the Pyramus River (now the Ceyhan River in Turkey) sprang
out of the earth again with such force that a javelin could scarcely be pushed into the water.
But the Pyramus, a navigable river with its sources in the middle of the plain, flows through
Cataonia. There is a notable pit in the earth through which one can see the water as it runs into
a long hidden passage undoing and then rises to the surface. If one lets down a javelin from
above into the pit, the force of the water resists so strongly that the javelin can hardly be
immersed in it.
The river in bore such a quantity of sediment that, according to an oracle, its deposits would one
day unite Cyprus with the mainland. Today's waterway is less dramatic, having been dammed for
hydroelectric generation, flood control and irrigation

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

In Publius Ovidius Naso's (43 BC-17 AD) -- Ovid to us -Metamorphoses (8 AD), the engulfed Stymphalus "glides in secret
eddies underground" before returning as a lordly river in the Argive
fields.

The modern Peloponnesian water tracing to the right closely agrees with the ancient record. The
water flows underground until forced to the surface at Kefalari. We'll learn why in Chapter 40,
Karstology.
Near the end of this chapter we'll table more of the encyclopedists' reported subterranean rivers.
Most of their reporting hasn't borne out as well as has the Stymphalus-Erasinus pipeline,
however.
The works of Strabo and Ovid would fuel centuries of geologic speculation. From this point
onward, the world would know of Greece not only in the sense of myth and history, but also as a
landscape of disappearing and reappearing waters.

Lake Stymphalus
Sinkholes at
Scotini and
Alea

River
Erasinus

10 kilometers

Gulf of Argos

Emergence at Kefalari

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

Born in Spain, Annaeus Seneca (4-65 AD) came to Rome as
physician to Nero, who ultimately rewarded his attendant by
execution. Seneca's Questiones Naturales was an ill-sorted
compilation of secondhand ideas. To the right is the cover from
a 1542 edition, another hint of how lasting would be the Latin
libraries. Seneca, like Vitruvius, would be considered expert in
water issues for 1500 years.
A vast world exists below.
There exist below everything that you see above. There, too,
are vast, immense recesses and vacant space, with mountains
overhanging on either hand.

Seneca attributed groundwater three sources:

1. Moisture continuously expelled within the earth.
The Sea... does not get larger, because it does not assimilate the water that runs into it, but
forthwith restores it to the earth. For the sea water returns by a secret path, and is filtered in
its passage back. Being dashed about as it passes through the endless, winding channels in
the ground, it loses its salinity, and, purged of its bitterness in such a variety of ground as it
passes through, it eventually changes into pure, fresh water.
2. Sluggish air converted into water within the earth by the forces of darkness and cold. Just as
a change in atmospheric density produces rain, a change of density beneath the earth turns
air into water. Locked in perpetual darkness, frigidity and inertness, the subterranean forces
supply the springs above without pause.
We Stoics are satisfied that the earth is interchangeable in its elements. So all this air that
she has exhaled in her interior, since it was not taken up by the free atmosphere, condenses
and is forthwith converted into moisture.
There you have the first cause of the origin of underground water.
The air above ground cannot long remain sluggish and heavy for it is subject, from time to time,
to rarefaction by the sun's heat or expansion by the force of the wind.
[A note regarding nomenclature: "Groundwater" and "ground water" are employed with roughlyequal frequency in both technical and popular literature. For internal consistency, we will use the
former, except for bibliographic references worded otherwise. "Underground water," on the other
hand, is just an adjective and noun, and written accordingly.]
3. Earth converted to water.
All elements arise from all: air comes from water, water from air; fire from air, air from fire. So
why should not earth be formed from water, and conversely, water from earth?
Seneca takes the trouble to refute a standard objection to transmutation. Given the boundless
supply of earth, why would water courses and springs ever dry up? His reply is that the course of
the water, not its source, is often disturbed by shocks in the earth.

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

He dismissed the role of rainfall in springflow.
Some suppose that all the water that the earth drinks in from rain is sent out again into the
rivers... [But] a great deal can obviously be urged in reply to this. First of all, as a diligent
digger among my vines, I can affirm from observation that no rain is ever so heavy as to wet the
ground to a depth of more than 10 feet... How, then, can rain, which merely damps the surface,
store up a supply sufficient for rivers?
Rain only feeds the regular rivers and creates temporary torrents. As water is a quarter of
nature, there can be no shortage of it. Rains cannot produce; they can only enlarge and
quicken a river.
Soil moisture, seen by Seneca in global perspective, moves from north to south.
The next account is that of Diogenes of Apollonia... The whole earth is full of perforations, and
there are paths of intercommunication from part to part. From time to time the dry parts draw
upon the moist. Had not the earth some source of supply, it would ere this have been
completely drained of its moisture. Well, then, the sun attracts the waves. The localities most
affected are the southern. When the earth is parched, it draws to it more moisture, just as in a
lamp the oil flows to the point where it is consumed, so the water inclines toward the place to
which the overpowering heat of the burning earth draws it. But where, it may be asked, is it
drawn from? Of course, it must be from those northern regions of eternal winter, where there is
a superabundance of it.
Now, one would like to ask Diogenes, seeing the deep and all streams ire in
intercommunication, why the rivers are not everywhere larger in summer? ...Another questionseeing that every land attracts moisture from other regions, and a greater supply in proportion
to its heat, why is any part of the world without moisture?
Regarding underground rivers,
Rivers are no less existent under the earth merely because they are not seen. You must
understand that down there rivers as large as our own glide along, some flowing gently, others
resounding in their tumbling over the broken ground. What then? Will you not equally allow
that there are some lakes underground and some waters stagnating there without exit?
Throughout the entire earth, one of them says, run many different kinds of water. In some
places there are perpetual rivers large enough to be navigable, even without the help of rains.
Moving air in the lower region inside the earth bursts the atmosphere, thick and complete with
clouds, with the same force that clouds in our part of the world are usually broken open.
Now permit me to tell you a story. Asclepiodotus is my authority that many men were sent
down by Philip [Philip II of Macedon (382-336 BC), father of Alexander the Great] into an old
mine, long since abandoned, to find out what riches it might have, what its condition was,
whether ancient avarice had left anything for future generations. They descended with a large
supply of torches, enough to last many days. After a while, when they were exhausted by the
long journey, they saw a sight that made them shudder: huge rivers and vast reservoirs of
motionless water, equal to ours above ground and yet not pressed down by the earth stretching
above, but with a vast free space overhead.
Heron of Alexandria (10-70) was a Greek engineer and geometer in Roman times. Hero is
credited with the first documented steam engine, the "aeolipile." In Dioptra he notes,
In order to know how much water the spring supplies it does not suffice to find the area of the
cross section of the flow which in this case is 12 square digits. It is necessary also to find the
speed of the flow, for the swifter the flow, the more water the spring supplies, and the slower,
the less. One should therefore dig a reservoir under the stream and note with the help of a
sundial how much water flows into the reservoir in a given time.

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

In the field of hydraulics, however, Herons
acknowledgement of velocity fell by the intellectual
wayside.
Reconstruction of one of Heron's automata by
Giovanni Battista Aleoti (1589). When Hercules hits
the head of the dragon, the monster shoots water on
his face.

In the chronologic midst of the Encyclopedists, we find Philo (20

BC - 50 AD), a Hellenistic Jew working to harmonize his faith with
Greek thought. Paradise may be located, according to Philo's
Questions and Answers on Genesis,
In some distant place far from our inhabited world, and has a
river flowing under the earth, which waters many great veins so
that these rising send water to other recipient veins, and so
become diffused.

Philo's fellow Hebrews would have little cared about the location of Paradise and his effort added
nothing to the Roman cartographic database, but Philo's speculation illustrates the ongoing
amalgamation of philosophies. As we will see in Chapter 4, The Cross, the Christians to follow
would become adamant proponents of the "river flowing under the earth."

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

Natural historian Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-79), better
known as Pliny the Elder, extracted 20,000 facts from 2,000
volumes to write Naturalis Historia, surely the most ambitious
literature review of all time. His facts were largely travelers
tales (e.g., an account of the Monocoli monopodal race),
reports of marvels (e.g., a boy commuting to and from school
on a dolphin), and ancient belief (e.g., the correlation between
celestial bodies and metals, the Sun being gold; Mars, iron;
Saturn, lead; and the Moon, silver).
To the right is a hand-illuminated page from the 1472 printing
of Naturalis Historia. By any measure, the Romans garnered
a long-lasting readership.

Pliny adhered to the Oceanus theory, citing Aristotle's authority.

The intention of the Artificer of nature must have been to unite the earth and water in a mutual
embrace, earth opening her bosom and water penetrating her entire frame by means of a
network of veins radiating within and without, above and below, the water bursting out even at
the tops of mountain ridges, to which it is driven and squeezed out by the weight of the earth,
and spurts out like a jet of water from a pipe. This theory shows clearly why the seas do not
increase in bulk with the daily accession of so many rivers. The consequence is that the earth
at every point of its globe is encircled and engirdled by sea flowing round it.
Pliny accepted Aristotles subterranean hydrologic cycle, the proof stemming from waters
preferred shape.
But what the vulgar most strenuously contend against is, to be compelled to believe that the
water is forced into a rounded figure; yet there is nothing more obvious to the sight among the
phenomena of nature. For we see everywhere, that drops, when they hand down, assume the
form or small globes.
Pliny refers to a network of veins where,
[Water] pushed by blasts of air and compressed by the weight of the earth... gushes forth in the
manner of a pump [siphon] to the highest levels.
Pliny endorses Aristotle as to "why the sea is salt" and gives qualitative description of salinity
distribution with depth:
Hence it is that the widely-diffused sea is impregnated with the flavor of salt, in consequence of
what is sweet and mild being evaporated from it, which the force of fire easily accomplishes;
while all the more acrid and thick matter is left behind; on which account the water of the sea is
less salt at some depth than at the surface.
Naturalis Historia provided a compendium of subterranean streams.
But some rivers so hate the sea, that they actually flow underneath the bottom of it, for instance
the spring Arethusa at Syracuse, in which things emerge that have been thrown into the
Alpheus which flows through Olympia and reaches the coast in the Peloponnese.

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

We will see more of this Syracuse connection in Chapter 29, Et In Arcadia Ego.
Instances of rivers that flow underground -- and come to the surface again are the Lycus in
Asia, the Erasinus in the Argolis and the Tigris in Mesopotamia; and objects thrown into the
Baths of Aesculapius at Athens are given back again in Phaleron Harbor [about 10 kilometers
distant]. Also a river that goes underground in the Plain of Atinas [in modern Turkey] comes
out 30 kilometers further on, as also does the Timavo in the district of Aquilea.
We will see more to the Timavo connection in Chapter 78, Underground and Balkanized.
Pliny observed an underground river from Lake Vadimo in Etruria (modern Tuscany), scene of a
310 BC battle.
The water is sky-blue; its smell is sulfurous, and its flavor has medicinal properties, and is
deemed of great efficacy in all fractures of the limbs. This lake empties itself into a river, which,
after running a little way, sinks underground, and, if anything is thrown in, it brings it up again
where the stream emerges.
Pliny the Younger (61-114) reported that his uncle, commanding the fleet at Misenum, ordered
his ships to cross the Bay of Naples for a first-hand look at Mt. Vesuvius where the fumes and
ash became so strong that they suffocated him.
Considering the consequence of Pliny the Elder's field trip, perhaps we should be less harsh on
the encyclopedists who worked from their offices in Rome.
In a letter written between 98 and 108 AD, the younger Pliny describes a peculiar spring near the
modern Lake Como:
There is a spring which rises in a neighboring mountain, and... falls into the Larian Lake. The
nature of this spring is extremely surprising. It ebbs and flows regularly three times a day. The
increase and decrease are plainly visible, and very amusing to observers. You sit down by the
side of the fountain, and whilst you are taking a repast, and drinking its water, which is
extremely cool, you see it gradually rise and fall. If you place a ring, or anything else, at the
bottom when it is dry, the stream reaches it by degrees till it is entirely covered, and then gently
retires; and if you wait you may see it thus alternately advance and recede three successive
times.
Pliny first considers the behavior of a liquid poured from a narrow-necked bottle,
Shall we say that some secret current of air stops and opens the fountain head as it
approaches to, or retires from it, as we see in bottles and other vessels of that nature when
there is not a free and open passage? Though you turn their necks downwards, yet, the
outward air obstructing the vent, they discharge their contents as it were by starts.
Or subterranean winds from the sea,
But may it not be accounted for upon the same principle as the flux and reflux of the sea. Or,
as those rivers which discharge themselves into the sea, meeting with contrary winds and the
swell of the ocean, are forced back into their channels, so may there not be something that
checks this fountain, for a time, in its progress?
Or the overflow of a subterranean reservoir,
Or is there, rather, a certain reservoir that contains these waters in the bowels of the earth,
which while it is recruiting its discharges, the stream flows more slowly and in less quantity, but
when it has collected its due measure, it runs again in its usual strength and fullness.
Or some sort of subterranean counterbalance,
Or, lastly, is there I know not what kind of subterraneous counterpoise, that throws up the water
when the fountain is dry, and stops it when it is full. You, who are so well qualified for the
inquiry, will examine the reasons of this wonderful phenomenon. It will be sufficient for me if I
have given you a clear description of it. Farewell."

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

This final hypothesis correctly points to a siphon, the subject of Chapter 46, but Pliny did not
understand the mechanism.
Pausanias (110-180) left us his Descrittione della
Grecia di Pausania, the original travel guide. A 1593
edition is shown to the right.
Pausanias traveled to Arcadia, famous for its closed
depressions and perennial springs, where he noted the
river Styx.
Pausanias repeated with more topographical detail
Strabo's information on the Stymphalus, the combined
origin of the Alpheus and the Eurotas, and the further
course of the Alpheus to Syracuse.
He recorded an occasion when drifted timber blocked
the sink at Stymphalus and the plain became a lake for
a width of 75 kilometers. A huntsman following a deer
into the marsh was said to have caused the blockage
to break apart and be drawn into the sink.
Well return to Arcadias depiction in poetry in Chapter
29.

Pausanias wrote that the Helicon River, after a course of 13 kilometers disappears into the earth
at the foot of Mt. Olympus and after another 4 kilometers, rises again as the Baphyra, navigable
to the sea. Legend told that the women who killed Orpheus wished to cleanse the bloodstains
and the river sank underground to avoid being an accomplice.
Were unsure to which modern stream this refers, but modern classicists never stop searching.
Pausanias recorded an Arcadian cave in which was lost to history until 1964, but more
fundamental than geographical modernity is this segment from Pausanias' sojourn in Epirus,
Near Cichyrus is a lake called Acherusia, and a river called Acheron. There is also Cocytus, a
most unlovely stream. I believe it was because Homer had seen these places that he made
bold to describe in his poems the regions of Hades, and gave to the rivers there the names of
those in Thesprotia.
It's Pausanias' tip of the hat to Homer.
The Spring of Castalia rises in the mountains and, though obviously fed by snowmelt, was said to
come from the subterranean Styx.

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

Pausanias, however, had a better story, one
involving cakes.
I have heard another account, that the
water was a gift to Castalia from the river
Cephisus. So Alcaeus has it in his
prelude to Apollo. The strongest
confirmation of this view is a custom of the
Lilaeans, who on certain specified days
throw into the spring of the Cephisus
cakes of the district and other things
ordained by use, and it is said that these
reappear in Castalia.

Castilia
Cephisus

The geographer Eratosthenes supposed that the Egyptian marshes of Rhinosoloura between
the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were formed by the Tigris and Euphrates, 1,000 kilometers
away.
Following are other Mediterranean-basin rivers said to disappear and re-emerge at locations
locatable on modern maps.
Reported Disappearance

Reported Reappearance

Arcadian Alpheus entering 2 kilometers of bushy

wetlands at the Ionian Sea. We'll revisit the lore of
Arcadia in Chapter 29.

Arethusa Spring near Syracuse, Sicily,

or alternatively, on the Aegean island of
Tenedos, south of the Dardanelles.

Asopus flowing through Sicyon, northwest of Corinth

Both Boeotia of modern Greece and

Anatolia of modern Turkey.

Inachus in Epirus

Peloponnesus.

Waters in Italy

Sicilian springs

The turbid Acheron in Epirus

Acheron at Hercales Pontica (modern

Eregli, Turkey), seen by the Argonauts

Caspian Sea

Black Sea

The Jordan at the Dead Sea

"Lost rivers" in western Spain.
The Tigris near its source in Anatolia

The map traces some of the reported

subterranean connections. Dots mark
reported submarine springs tabled
below.

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

Reported Submarine Springs

Dulcis Portus on the west coast of Epirus
Spring of Deine in the Argotic Gulf.
Cape Matapan, the southernmost point of Peloponnesus, perhaps a version of the actual
cavern discharge at Pirgos Diru.
Between the island of Aradus and the Phoenician mainland, 2 miles off the coast from Tripoli.
Between Baia and Ischia (island west of Naples) or near Pozzuouli, near Naples
Off the coast of Lycia on the southwestern Turkish Anatolian coast.
Cte d'Azuris or 20 kilometers southeast of Marseille
Near Cadiz in the Atlantic.
We'll return to such sites in Chapter 44, Submarine Springs and Submarine Rivers.
Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BC) is better known as Virgil.
Although his Georgics (29 BC) refers to rivers which issue from
caverns as homes to Nymphs, we include this Roman in our
study of underground rivers for his contribution of the Aeneid
(19 BC), a tale written in praise of the Roman state.
Unlike the encyclopedic works we've cataloged above, the
Aeneid is but a story. But in with the encyclopedic works, it's
not particularly original. In fact, it's but a re-spin of... -- well,
take a guess.
The Aeneid begins with Aeneas' escape during the Trojan War
and follows his descent into an underworld of river familiar to
us. And whom do we meet? Charon, the curmudgeonly
ferryman!
That will be two obols, sir.
The Aeneid parallels the Odyssey in structure, romanizes the characters and expands upon the
incidents, but it's Homer's saga. Here's Virgil's Charon in verse.
There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast -A sordid god, down from his hairy chin
A length of beard descends, uncombed, unclean;
His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire;
A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire.
As noted earlier in this chapter, both Strabo and Pliny spoke of the subterranean Timavo River.
So does the Aeneid. From Edward Fairfax Taylor's translation
Safe could Antenor pass the Illyrian shore
Through Danaan hosts, and realms Liburnian gain,
And climb Timavus and her springs explore,
Where through nine mouths, with roaring surge, the main
Bursts from the sounding rocks and deluges the plain.
We will wait until Chapter 78, however, Underground and Balkanized, to pull the Roman accounts
into geographical relationship.

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Chapter 3 -- Roman Encyclopedists

In the manner of the table in Chapter 1,

Odyssey (c. 855 BC)

Author
Protagonist
Setting

Opening

Aeneid (19 BC)

Homer

Virgil

Odysseus

Aeneas

Mythical Mediterranean, mythical times

Tell me, O muse, of that
ingenious hero who travelled
far and wide after he had
sacked the famous town of
Troy.

Arms, and the man I sing,

who, forc'd by fate, and
haughty Juno's unrelenting
hate, Expell'd and exil'd, left
the Trojan shore.

Lotus Eaters
Characters

Odyssey survivors tale

Cyclops
Sirens

Rivers

Acheron
Cocytus

To deep Acheron they take

their way, whose troubled
eddies, thick with ooze and
clay, are whirl'd aloft, and in
Cocytus lost.

Styx

Between the living and dead.

Lethe

On the far side, Aeneas

descendants

Pyriphlegethon
By the late third century, Rome was intellectually spent, the Empire having spun itself into two
segments, the western half to be the foundation for the European Middle Ages and the eastern
half to become the Byzantine Empire.
But before advancing to Chapters 4-6 to see what became of the Greco-Roman legacy, let's
summarize our journey to this point.
Greek mythology laid down a rich lore of underground rivers.
Greek philosophers molded the tales into explanatory patterns based on reason.
Roman encyclopedists dutifully cataloged numerous instances of such waters.
One might think that the topic of underground rivers is now resolved, but the Greeks and Romans
were just feeding our curiosities.

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Chapter 4 -- The Cross

CHAPTER 4
THE CROSS
In this and the next two chapters we will chronicle
The first millennium. How the nature of underground rivers fell into the domain of Christian
theology.
The change of millennia. How Greek thought regarding such waters was preserved by the
Arabs.
The early second millennium. How the Church reinterpreted what flows beneath the earth.
To begin, we'll summarize the Christian interpretation's Hebrew formulation in an environment
where water and cultural destiny intertwine. The tribe controlling the water sources is the tribe
that survives.
The Book of Genesis
As would have most early Christians addressing the workings of nature, well start with Creation,
The worlds water originated within the earth, as chronicled in Genesis 2:6.
But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
The "mist" is ed in Hebrew which also means flow, stream or spring. Etymology points to the
Sumerian/Akkadian id, the cosmic river, as in "from the mouth whence issues the waters of the
earth and brought her sweet water from the earth," in the Sumerian story of Enki and Nihursag.
Genesis 2:10-14 enumerates what have come to be known as the "Four Rivers of Life," the
Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Perath.
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became
into four heads.
The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where
there is gold;
And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of
Havilah.
And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria.
And the fourth river is the Perath.
The Hiddekel and the Perath are likely the Tigris and Euphrates. As "Havilah" means "stretch of
sand," the Gihon is associated with desert and thus, the Nile. (Jerusalem's Gihon Springs -which we'll visit in Chapter 65, Subterranean Aqueducts -- was named from the Genesis story,
not the other way around.)
The modern identity of the Pison is disputed. The Ganges, the Araxes and the Uizhun have been
proposed as well as the now-dry Wadi Bisha in Kuwait. Early Syriac commentators endorsed the
Danube. The Hebrew scholar Nahmanides thought the Pison to be the Indus.
While the Book of Genesis makes no assertion that any of the rivers flowed underground, the
need for such a pathway seems sound. As Yi-Fu Tuan notes in The Hydrologic Cycle and the
Wisdom of God (1968),
The Garden of Eden is without weather. Ideally Eden is a balmy and sunny place having more
or less the climate of sub-tropical desert, and yet watered by four perennial streams. Such
geography demands a subterranean source for surface water.

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Chapter 4 -- The Cross

Topographia by Cosmas Indicopleustes, a sixth-century Christian merchant, describes the Red
Sea and Indian Ocean as having rivers beneath them which "cleave a passage through the
ocean and spring up in this earth."
Divine scripture, with a view to show the diameter of Paradise, how great it is, and how far it
extended eastward, mentions the four rivers only, and thence we learn that the fountain which
springs up in Eden and waters the garden, distributes the residue of its waters among the four
great rivers which cross over into this earth and water and a large part of its surface.
We'll inspect Cosmas' sub-oceanic river map in Chapter 14.
Let us turn to Genesis 4:11-12.
And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's
blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her
strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
Note the change of adverb in the chronology of translations.
King James Version
American Standard Version
Revised Standard Version
New International Version
New King James Version
21st Century King James

1611
1901
1946
1973
1982
1994

in the earth
in the earth
on the earth
on the earth
on the earth
on the earth

Are we on the earth, or are we inside it? We'll speculate in Chapter 15, Hollow Earth
Geophysics.
Genesis 11:7 concerns Noah's Flood.
The same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven
were opened.
"Fountains of the deep," will come to be a favorite phrase of those striving to assign a Biblical
basis to the science of hydrology.
The Book of Exodus
Subterranean waters made the Second Commandment, Exodus 20:4.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven
above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Water under the earth was physically known to the Hebrews. They knew of hand-dug qanats,
(Chapter 65) in Armenia and Persia. Hebrew land extended to the River Jordan, the eastern
source said to emerge fully-formed from an iron-red limestone cliff at the foot of Mt. Hermon.

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Chapter 4 -- The Cross

After the Hebrews escape from Egypt, the refugees
Came to Elim where there were twelve wells of water, and
threescore and ten palm trees; and then encamped there by
the waters. -- Exodus 15:27
When the refugees needed more water, God told Moses at Mt.
Horeb (modern Sinai).
"And thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water
out of it, that the people may drink. -- Exodus 17:6.

The Spring of Elim at Wadi Tayyib al-Ism

is said to be that water.

The Second Book of Kings

Todays Ain-es-Sultan, the Sultan's Spring
near Jericho, is the spring "healed" by
Elishas casting of salt (II Kings 2:21) and the
source of Barada (the Biblical "Abana").
Syrians still escape modern Damascus to
enjoy the apricot, apple and walnut trees.
According to the he International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development,
The principal emergence of the spring,
which has been enclosed in a structure
since Roman times, resembles an
underground river several meters across
which flows up and out of the limestone
formation of the mountain. The total flow
has averaged 8.63 cubic meters per
second.
Jordan Valley, from The Bible Educator
(1870) with overlay of modern Ain-es-Sultan
The Book of Psalms
Hebrew geography was Babylonian, the sea encircling the earth and hidden channels to the
great deep from which all waters derive (Psalms 136:6). Hebrew/Babylonian floods came from
below, not from above. The vassal-treaties of Esarhaddon declare, "May a flood, an irresistible
deluge, rise from the bowels of the earth and devastate you."

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Chapter 4 -- The Cross

The Book of Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes 1:7 cemented the early Christian opinion concerning underground waters.
All the rivers run into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full;
To the place from which the rivers come,
There they return again.
How the rivers return is not specified, but as such conduits are not visible on the surface, it stands
to reason that they must be below.
The term rivers of this verse is the Hebrew nhl, flash flows in wadies after heavy rainfall.
Nhr, Hebrew for a river continually flowing, was not used for streams in Palestine, but was used
for the Tigris and Euphrates. Ecclesiastes 1:7 speaks metaphorically of the vain course of human
nature, for those seeking scriptural explanation of nature, the verse would provide 2000 years of
mindset. We'll get back to metaphors in Chapter 30.
And now we must move on to the New Testament, which is to say, welcome the Greeks.
The Early Church
Jesus made what must have been an arduous trip to "the
Gates of Hades" in Caesarea Philippi (Mathew 16:13), at
least a full day uphill from Bethsaida. The gate was the
Cave of Pan with its Paneion Springs, a 15 by 20-meter
cavern which in pre-Roman times was taken to be an
entrance to the underworld. King Herod built a marble
edifice dedicated to Caesar at the entrance.
Reference to an underground Hell is nonexistent in the
Old Testament. Hebrew tradition was not particularly
concerned with questions of the afterlife; "She'ol" is
where all go. To a Jew such as Matthew, "the Gate of
Hades" was to a Greek Hades.
The early Christians thus advanced a hydrologic perspective based on the authority of the
Hebrews, Greeks and Romans.
De Providentia by Bishop of Cyrus Theodoretus (393-457) instructs the
faithful that water rises to the mountain tops in obedience to the word of
God.

Springs

In the diagram to the right, it's the will of God -- angel power, we might
say -- that moves waters from the sea to hillside springs. Nothing more
need be said regarding the physics, as the Church had more important
matters with which to deal. The noun "Agnostic," for example, is from
"agnus" (lamb) and "Stygis," our very own River Styx. "Agnostic" was
applied to those who thought the specific miracles of Christianity to be
improvable and thus by reason of the Lamb of God, neither believing nor
disbelieving, would be left stranded on the riverbank.
Ocean

Emerging in the fifth century, the monastic movement was about prayer, not the workings of
nature, but nonetheless, monastic transcriptions over the subsequent 800 years preserved
medical manuals, a small portion of Platos writings, astrological charts and Latin comprehendi,.

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Chapter 4 -- The Cross

The scriptorium was generally situated near the monastery kitchen to prevent frozen fingers.
A Syrian, a Greek, a Spaniard, a Roman, a Celt and a Frank
We can catch the intellectual flavor of the era from a geographic spread of dutiful men of the
cloth.
Ephraem the Syrian (306-373), a theologian of the in the Syriac Orthodox
Church, had this to say in Commentary on Genesis.
The four rives, then, are these: the Pison, which is the Danube; the
Gihon, which is the Nile; and then the Tigris and the Euphrates,
between which we dwell. Although the places from which they flown
are known, the source of the spring is not [known]. Because Paradise
is set on a great height, the rivers are swallowed up again and they go
down to the sea as if rivers through a tall water duct and so they pass
through the earth which is under the sea into this land. The earth then
spits our each one of them; the Danube, which is the Pison, in the
west; the Gihon in the south; and the Euphrates and the Tigris in the
north.
To Ephraem, all four Rivers of Life are subterranean.

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Chapter 4 -- The Cross

Bishop of Hippo and author of Confessions, Augustine (354-430) provided
emerging Christianity a philosophical -- as opposed to purely theological -basis. According to Augustine, Plato's acquiescence to things supernatural
was well-suited for a faith based on grace. Aristotelian eternalism, on the
other hand, seemed incompatible. Platos world-view allowed divine will,
while Aristotles mechanistic arrangements constrained God's holy hand.
Unlike Aristotles motionless mover, a Neo-Platonic cosmology featured a
creator who shares his goodness from pre-existent and co-eternal matter.

To seal Plato's supremacy in matters philosophical,

Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than
all the powers of the human mind.
The meaning is simple: Believe what is told, not what is noticed. The fact that Platonic
philosophy is not as conducive to the study of nature as is an Aristotelian viewpoint poses little
problem a St. Augustine disinclined to study nature. Despite being translated into Latin by
Boethius (475-524), Aristotles observational -- often biological -- world-view was thus relegated
to disrepute.
Although Augustine had less interest in worldly questions, his writings occasionally spilled in that
direction. Consider, for example, The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century
(2002), edited by John Rotelle.
Since the actual site of Paradise totally escapes human ken, the waters from it are indeed
divided into four parts, as the utterly trustworthy testimony of scripture assures us, but that
those rivers whose sources are said to be known have gone underground somewhere, and
after wending their way through extensive regions have gushed out in other places, where their
sources are held to be known. Is anybody unaware, I mean, that there are streams which
regularly do this? But it only comes to our attention where they do not flow underground for
any great distance.
Though God created but four rivers, how can we now have many? One would doubt this to be a
pressing question in its own merit, but here a bishop could not concede an incomplete Holy Word.
A springhead is not a source, but one of many outlets from one of four underground waterways,
the good bishop instructs.
Augustine's philosophical framework would gird the evolving Church. As we will see shortly, his
passing mention of streams flowing underground would likewise guide the yet-to-come science.
The Spaniard, Isidore of Seville (570-639), produced the encyclopedic Etymologies, the seminal
compendium of secular knowledge of his period. More than 1000 manuscripts in length,
Etymologies cataloged the seven liberal arts identified by the Roman Encyclopedist Varro
(Chapter 3) plus,
Medicine
Law
The Calendar
Theology
Anthropology (including monstrous races)
Geography
Cartography
Cosmology
Mineralogy
Agriculture

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Chapter 4 -- The Cross

As Etymologies strove to reconcile the world with Genesis, fossils were the remains from Noah's
flood.
Isidores opinion regarding springs and rivers was that of the Pliny the Elder (Chapter 3) who in
turn was repeating the Greeks.
Moreover that the sea does not increase, though it receives all streams and all springs, is
accounted for in this way; partly that its very greatness does not feel the waters flowing in;
secondly, because the bitter water consumes the fresh that is added, or that the clouds draw up
much water to themselves, or that the winds carry it off, and the sun partly dries it up; lastly,
because the water leaks through certain secret holes in the earth, and turns and runs back to
the sources of rivers and to the springs.
It's a wordy Ecclesiastes 1:7.
The abyss is the deep water which cannot be penetrated; whether caverns of unknown waters
from which springs and rivers flow; or the waters that pass secretly beneath, whence it is called
abyss. For all waters or torrents return by secret channels to the abyss which is their source.
Streamflow is thus a combination of rainfall and underground "secret holes."
Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius' (395-423 AD) had argued that if rain doesn't fall toward the
earth's center -- contrary to lore regarding Columbus, scholars
back to the Greeks recognized the earth to be spherical -precipitation missing the edges must ascend toward the
heavens. A scribe's illustration is to the right.
But such thought experiments were becoming lost to Platonic
disinterest as unexamined pathways of nature came to be put
forth as de-facto proof of physically-untestable divine law.

John the Scot (800-880) proposed in De Divisione Naturae (866) a sacred

steadiness in the course of all creation. Ecclesiastes 1:7 served his
argument against ungodly material progress,
Divine goodness... flows downward like a stream, first into the
primordial causes, bringing them into being. Next, continuing
downward through these primordial causes, ineffable in their workings,
but still in harmony with them, they flow from higher to lower, finally
reaching the lowest ranks of the All. The return flow is through the most
secret pores of nature by a most concealed path to the source.

Analogy to flow "through the most secret pores of nature by a most concealed path" may illustrate
John's opinion about divine goodness, but it is one more illustration of theology intermingled with
subterranean waters.

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Chapter 4 -- The Cross

The Frank, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), a theologian of mystical
bent, compared the sea to Christ.
The sea is the source of fountains and rivers; the Lord Jesus Christ is
the source of every kind of virtue and knowledge.

In a sermon from his Cantica Canticorum, the subterranean water course

becomes an Ecclesiastic metaphor for spiritual operation.

If all waters seek incessantly to return to the sea, making their way thither sometimes by hidden
and subterranean channels, so that they may go forth from it again in continual and untiring
circuit, becoming visible once more to man and available for his service, why are not those
spiritual streams rendered back constantly and without reserve to their legitimate source, that
they may not cease to water the fields in our hearts? Let the rivers of diverse graces return
from whence they came, that they may flow forth anew.
Metaphor notwithstanding, Bernard bemoans his generation as dwarfs standing on the shoulders
of Greek giants, unable to see farther by individual brilliance, but through mastery of the classics.
Conclusion
As fewer and fewer Europeans thought about more than basic needs and religious ritual, ancient
texts were left to decompose. Instances can be uncovered of sequestered intellectualism -- we
tip our hat to Macrobius -- but critical thought in large part was increasingly stifled by dogma.
The imaginative richness associated with underground rivers had faded. No one was retelling the
tale of Charon, compiling novel encyclopedias, thinking about rainfall missing the earth, peering
into caverns. Ecclesiastes 1:7 posed no an intellectual invitation.
Physically out of sight, intellectually out of mind, thought about underground rivers approached
extinction.

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Chapter 5 -- The Crescent

CHAPTER 5
THE CRESCENT
We will see in Chapter 41, Sinkholes, how scuba divers successfully linked two systems of
underground waterways to form in combination the world's longest underground river.
The Arabs of 600-1200 were likewise linkers of underground rivers, their curation being the bridge
from a faltering Western legacy to the concepts we recognize today.
We should qualify our employment of the term "Arabic" in its geo-political, not ethnic, sense.
Subjects of Arabic rule included Persians, Negroid Africans, Christians of many stripes, Jews and
others.
The original Hebrews had no ethnic advantage in attention to water. All desert peoples accorded
water cultural importance. The Shari'a, the source of Islamic law -- and thus the crux of Arabic
identity -- literally means "source of water." Quranic verses alluding to water underground
include,
And give glad tidings to those who believe and do righteous good deeds that for them will be
Gardens under which rivers flow. -- 2:25.
For such, the reward is Forgiveness from their Lord, and Gardens under which rivers flow,
wherein they shall abide forever. -- 3:136.
I will remit from them their evil deeds and admit them into Gardens under which rivers flow. -3:195.
But, for those who fear their Lord, are Gardens under which rivers flow. -- 3:198.
Lo! Allah will cause those who believe and do good works to enter Gardens under which rivers
flow. -- 22:23.
He sendeth down water from the sky, so that valleys flow according to their measure. -- 13:17.
And We [Allah] have placed therein gardens of the date-palm and grapes, and We have caused
springs of water to gush forth therein. -- 36:34.
Hast thou not seen how Allah hath sent down water from the sky and hath caused it to
penetrate the earth as water springs... Lo! Herein verily is a reminder for men of
understanding. -- 39:21.
If all your water were to disappear into the earth, who then could bring you gushing water? -67:30.
The degree to which ancient texts lend themselves to modern interpretation is a never-ending
challenge.
Consider, for example, "tajri min tahtiha al-anhar," the Arabic phrase common to the above texts
translated as "under which rivers flow." In contextual Arabic, the phrase suggests rivers running
through gardens surrounding an elevated dwelling, the palaces of Paradise in this case.
Shehzad Saleem addresses our question directly in "Will Paradise have Underground Rivers?"
Renaissance, January 2012.
In order to understand the Qur'anic description of Paradise, it may be noted that the Arabs of
the times of the Prophet (peace and mercy upon him) had a special taste regarding gardens.
To them, the most scenic of gardens and orchards were those which were situated at some
height above the ground level on some mountain or hill such that rivers and streams would flow
around and beneath them at a lower altitude. The height not only adds to the beauty of the
orchard, but also secures it from floods and similar calamities.

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Chapter 5 -- The Crescent

Thus the words do not mean that the gardens of Paradise would have underground rivers. The
words here signify a relative lower altitude of the rivers and not their being underground. The
following verse portrays such a garden,
And the likeness of those who spend their wealth, seeking to please Allah and to
strengthen their souls is as a garden high and fertile: heavy rain falls on it but makes it
yield a double increase of harvest, and if it receives not heavy rain, light moisture
suffices it. Allah sees well whatever you do. (2:265)
At another place, the Qur'an has mentioned the various types of rivers that will flow in
Paradise:
[Here is] a description of the Paradise which the righteous are promised: in it are rivers
of water incorruptible; rivers of milk of which the taste never changes; rivers of wine, a
joy to those who drink; and rivers of honey pure and clear. (47:15)
Paradise, we are thus informed, thus does not necessarily include underground rivers.
But our debt to Islam isn't the answer to that question, had it occurred to us to wonder. The debt
is much greater; it's for preserving the Hellenistic roots of Western culture.
A side-by-side timetable helps tell the story. The political events highlight the rise and fall of
Arabic influence. The intellectual events relate to the stewardship of Greek understanding.
Highlights of Middle Eastern Political and Intellectual History
Political Highlights
476

Intellectual Highlights

Fall of Rome

489

The Persian school of Jundishapur

gives refuge to Nestorian Christians.

529

Refuge given to those from Platos

Academy

c. 610

Muhammad receives first vision.

630-642

Muslims capture Mecca. Arabia vows

allegiance to Islam. Arab armies take
Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia,
North African coast and portions of
Persia and Byzantium.

710

Arab armies invade Spain from North

Africa.

732

Battle of Tours thwarts northward

Arabic advance.
Maximum extent of Arabic Empire

c. 750

Persian, Greek and Jewish scholars in

Baghdad begin translating classical
Greek works into Arabic. The center
of intellectual thought passes from
Europe to the Middle East

Late eighth
century

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Chapter 5 -- The Crescent

822

Caliph al-Ma'mun founds the Bayt al

Hikilometersah (House of Wisdom), a
center for the translation of
philosophical and scientific works from
Greek to Arabic.

Ninth and
tenth
centuries

Revival of learning at Constantinople

981-1037

Persian physician ibn Sina, known to

the West as Avicenna

1060-1087

First systematic translation of Arabic

texts into Latin by Constantine the
African at Mt. Cassino, Italy

Mid 11th
century
1096-1099

Apex of the Arabic Golden Era

Crusaders conquer Jerusalem and
establish principalities along the
eastern Mediterranean.

1125-1200

Translation of Aristotle from Arabic

into Latin by Spanish Jews, a high
point for multiculturalism.

1126-1298

Iberian-Arab Ibn Rushd, known to the

West as Averroes

1187

Crusaders defeated near Jerusalem

and Crusader enclaves begin to
crumble.

1453

Ottoman Empire captures

Constantinople, renaming it Istanbul,
and continues to expand until the
Turks control much of the Middle East.

1492

Christians reclaim Granada, expelling

Muslims and Jews.

As the Dark Ages enshrouded the West, the eastern world was in ascent and Arabic scholarship
was free to procure what seemed worthy. Core to our timeline are the right-hand entries flagging
Greek works and ideas preserved by Arab institutions. Knowledge from many vassal states
would have been archived, of course, but much of it would have faded from interest.
But the dustbin was not the fate of the Greco-Roman collection. Hebrew scholars, also "People
of the Book," were welcomed into the caliphs' courts to sort through the intellectual booty.
Had Islam not been politically secure and able to afford intellectual diversity, pagan myths of
underground rivers might have been discarded from translations of Aristotle. This is not to imply
that the Arabs believed the Greek, but they recognized the meaning of Charon. Had not the
Arabs been actively constructing a philosophy compatible with Islam, questions posed by the
Greeks would not have been weighed.
Ecclesiastes 1:7 isn't Qur'anic, but the Hebrew question wasn't particular to a single race.
Particular to our interest in underground rivers are two Arabs named in the timeline.

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Chapter 5 -- The Crescent

As a reward for curing his ruler's illness, Avicenna (981-1037)
was allowed use of the Royal Library of the Samanids and from
such study, wrote at least 400 works, the most important being
the Book of Healing and the Canon of Medicine. Exceeding its
title, the first was based on Euclid's Elements and dealt with
logic, natural sciences, psychology, mathematics and music.
The second became the most famous volume in the history of
medicine, the source book for Renaissance practitioners.
Although the drawing shows Avicenna getting wisdom from a
muse, most of his knowledge began in the library.
Avicenna considered a question similar to one asked by
Aristotle. If nature continually erodes material from the
mountains to the sea, what then regenerate the continents?
Avicenna concluded that the forces of earthquakes and
volcanoes recreate the land, in the process moving marine
fossils to mountain tops. Presumably seeing a relationship with
the period of the zodiac, he estimated the cycle of erosion and
regeneration to be 36,000 years.

Avicennas reiterated Aristotle's picture of river-perforated terrestrial subsurface. When 500 years
later when Europe would at last look at geology, Avicennas Aristotelianism would be a point from
which to begin.

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Chapter 5 -- The Crescent

We'll note ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126-1198), a Muslim from Cordoba, not for
a particular pronouncement regarding our underground rivers, but for
recognizing the fallacy in forcing physical insight into a mold of theological
preconception. Averroes sought to integrate the more profound aspects of
Islam with Greek thought, his Grand Commentaries advocating the principle
of twofold truth: religion for the unlettered multitude and philosophy
(Aristotelian tinged with Neo-Platonism) for the chosen.
Lesotho postage stamp, 1999. Averroes translating Aristotle.

As an aside, we'll revisit Raphael's famed "School of Athens," the

painting mentioned in Chapter 2 with reference to its two central
figures, Plato and Aristotle. To the left, looking over shoulder of
Pythagoras, is Averroes.
At least many scholars think the turbaned scholar to be Averroes. The
argument to the contrary rests on the fact that he's grouped with
Pythagoras, not Aristotle himself. Individual identity perhaps matters
little; the overarching point is Raphael's attribution to Arabic
membership in the glorified Athenian tradition.

The Extraction of Hidden Waters to the Surface by Persian mathematician

Al-Karaji (953-1029) distinguishes between phreatic, confined and perched
groundwater. Without reference to hydrostatic pressure, Al-Karaji properly
interpreted the physical basis for springs and artesian wells. He
recognized the hydrologic cycle.
The transformation of water into air in the hot regions and air into water
in the cold regions creates a constant cycle which guarantees the
prosperity of the lands.
Soviet postage stamp, 1993
Astronomer and geographer Al-Biruni (973-1048) was more explicit,
explaining water level in springs and artesian wells by the principle of water
finding its own level via interconnecting subterranean channels.

Afghan postage stamp, 1973

The Islamic contribution to the study of underground rivers was thus twofold.
Unlike Christian appropriation of Hebrew scriptures, Qur'anic text lent itself to interpretation
consistent with what we now know as the hydrologic cycle
Islamic scholarship freed natural philosophy from theology. Speculation about underground
rivers hinged on logic and experience, not revelation. As we will see in the chapter to come,
such allowance would likewise come in the West, but more slowly and with more disputes.
Millions of pilgrims each year drink water from the Zamzam Well, 20 meters east of the Kaaba in
Mecca. Tradition holds that Abraham's wife, Hagar, ran seven times between the hills of Safa

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Chapter 5 -- The Crescent

and Marwah in search of water for her infant son Ishmael, but could find none. When the baby's
foot scraped the earth, however, the Zamzam was miraculously generated. Another version of
the story says that the angel Gabriel kicked the ground with his heel. The Zamzam is held to be
the point of origin for underground streams flowing under the Seven Towers of Satan.
"Herodotus II, 28 on the Sources of the Nile," Journal of Hellenic Studies 73 (1953) by G.A.
Wainwright makes reference to
A pilgrim who lost his drinking-cup in the well Zemzem at Mecca and recovered it in the spring
of el-Gebel in Syria.
In 771, a marbled dome was built above the well; the
current enclosure dates to 1499. The wellhead is not
accessible to the public, but the water is pumped to
the eastern part of the mosque, where it is made
available to believers.

A pulley for lifting Zamzam water dating

to the end of the 14th century.
A brass bucket used in the 13th century.
W.B. Seabrook speaks in Adventures in Arabia (1927) of secret caverns beneath the shrine at
Sheik-Adi on Mt. Lalesh in modern Iraq with a subterranean river which the Kurds believe to flow
from the Zamzam.
We found ourselves in a vaulted cavern, partly natural, it
seemed, and partly hewn from the rock, and around a
corner the sound of rushing water -- a sound which we had
heard as a murmur in the upper temple, but had supposed
to come from some near-by stream flowing down the
mountainside.
We could not see the whole of the cavern, or guess how far
it extended. Its floor at the foot of the steps was covered
with water, which I guessed from the slope to be not more
than ankle-deep. But the priest made it an excuse to deter
us from going farther, declaring that there was no use
getting our feet wet, since there was nothing more to see.
Our partial penetration of it was interesting chiefly as establishing the fact that the whole temple
edifice was constructed over subterranean caverns and streams and springs, some of the water
of which was led into the pools we had seen in the temple and courtyard above. I learned later
that the Yezidees believed these waters flowed by a subterranean river across all Arabia,
underneath the desert from the miraculous spring of Zem-Zem in Mecca.
Lore of subterranean connection yet remains, as evidenced by Bruce G. Privratsky's Muslim
Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory (2001).
The wells at Muslim shrines in Central Asia are held in popular belief to be connected by a
mystical underground river with the well in Mecca from which miraculous zam-zam water is
drawn by pilgrims.
Folklore aside, the Zamzam is derived from the nearby Wadi Ibrahim. The shaft is roughly 30
meters in depth and 1.1 to 2.7 meters in diameter. The upper half is in sandy alluvium lined with
stone masonry; the lower half, in bedrock. Between the alluvium and the bedrock is a 0.5-meter

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Chapter 5 -- The Crescent

weathered stratum. The Zamzam has never gone dry, but has been deepened in times of severe
drought.
The water is 3.2 meters below the surface. A 24-hour pumping test
at 8 cubic meters/second showed a drop of 13.4 meters, after which
the level stopped receding. When pumping stopped, the water level
recovered 12.7 meters in only 11 minutes, indication of a highly
permeable aquifer.
Zamzam water has a distinct taste similar to seawater.

At its climax, Islamic scholarship had surpassed Greek learning in many fields and created new
branches of mathematics and natural philosophy. But with the beginning of the second Christian
millennium, religious and political forces began to call us again westward.

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Chapter 6 -- And Back to the Cross

CHAPTER 6
AND BACK TO THE CROSS
How was the world viewed through Western eyes
as Christendom moved into its second millennium?
To the right is a copy of the Ebstorf Map (c. 1234)
of Gervase of Tilbury (c. 1150-1228). East is to top
At the heart of the world lies Jerusalem, but our
focus is the map's top, the detail shown below. The
Garden of Eden is guarded by towering mountains
which flow the four rivers of Paradise, of which the
Pison splits into eleven tributaries of the Ganges.
Although many lands had been discovered since
the founding of the Church, the metaphysical world
view wasn't that different.

Aristotle's Meteorologica was translated from Arabic to Latin before 1200, but the Church was
adverse to Islamic interpretation of a pagan philosopher. As we will see in Chapter 13,
Hydrotheology/Theohydrology, Christendom would be heavy-handed in classical reincorporation
for centuries yet to come, but at last the intellectual gate was re-opening.
Advocates of a more-pragmatic Christian world made known their challenge to Aquinas' tilt
toward Plato. The fundamental challenge wasn't one of science, of course, as science hadn't
been invented; it was one of theology.
To make Aristotle acceptably-Catholic -- to the Philosophers post-mortem protest, we must
assume -- took an agile most.

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Chapter 6 -- And Back to the Cross

Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274) saw Aristotles Prime
Mover as a foundation for Christian thought and
Aristotle's pragmatic world as better suited to God's
will than the hazy world of Plato.
Aquinas thus came to regard Aristotle as the
greatest of philosophers unexposed to revelation.

Aquinas sought to prove that God did not violate natural law, and thus, sensory experience.
While some aspects of reality may not be accessible to rational thought, Aquinas exuded
confidence in the ability of reason to describe observable events and thus come to an improved
understanding of God.
Aquinas used a form of medieval argument known as scholasticism, first stating the arguments
against, then for, the side he wishes to defend, and then pointing out the arguments in favor and
the weaknesses for the other side.
Aquinas' Summa Theologiae (1265-75) presented Aristotle so
formidably that subsequent scientific realizations came to be
criticized simply because they were not penned by Aristotle
himself.
Less fundamental in theological/philosophical perspective, but
most pertinent to our underground river journey, would be Aquinas'
regard of the Edenic rivers,
It is supposed that since the site of Paradise is far removed from
the knowledge of men... The rivers whose sources are said to
be known have gone underground and after traversing vast
distances have issued forth in other places... That some
streams are in the habit of doing this is something that
everybody knows.
Aristotle had admitted his proposition of subterranean streamflow
to be a Hellenist pass-along, not a verified fact and certainly not a
metaphysical principal. Aquinas does much the same, blithely
kicking forward the thoughts of the trusted Greek.

The concluding line, "That some streams are in the habit of doing this is something that
everybody knows," tells all. Aquinas takes the pronouncement for granted, common knowledge.
The intellect of St. Aquinas, the progressive theologian, is directed toward more lofty subjects.
The Condemnation of 1277, proclaiming divine will as sufficient explanation for all phenomena,
was the conservative's last attempt to stifle Aristotelian heresy, but for reasons both pragmatic
and intellectual -- but not what we can call scientific -- the Condemnation was repealed in 1325.
Aristotelianism provided theology a garb of objectivity and had become Vatican dogma, at least
where it didn't blatantly contradict biblical wording.
In issues of biblical wording, however, there could be but one interpretation.

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Chapter 6 -- And Back to the Cross

Bartholomaeus Anglicus (c. 1250) acknowledged
that the sun could evaporate some water from the
sea or that the winds might skim water off its
surface but the chief cause of streamflow lay in the
subterranean connections. From a 1470 English
translation of his De Proprietatibus Rerum,
The fresh water than rains into the sea is
consumed and wasted by the heat of the sun
until it becomes food and nourishment for the
sea's salinity. But Ecclesiastes, the maker of
waters, says that they [the waters] come again in
secret veins of the earth to the well heads and
out of the mother that is the sea, welling and
springing out in well heads.

Ecclesiastes 1:7 explains all that requires explanation.

More than any cleric, however, it was Dante Alighieri (1265-1321),
a poet astute in the theo-politics of his day, who brought classical
lore into line with pious orthodoxy. Dante saw Christian mores in
Greek legend.
Where Odysseus sported quasi-god-like qualities, Dante's Inferno
(1314) follows the quest of a mortal through the levels of hell in
accord with the ideas of the medieval Church.

Herman Melville's copy

Within an ancient mountain ("Dentro dal monte") of Crete stands the broken statue
of an old man who forewarns Dante and his companion Virgil of the rivers below.
"Their course falls from rock to rock into this valley. They form Acheron, Styx
and Phlegethon, then, by this narrow channel, go down to where there is no
further fall, and form Cocytus: you will see what kind of lake that is: so I will not
describe it to you here."

I said to him: "If the present stream flows down like that from our world, why does it only appear
to us on this bank?"
And he to me: "You know the place is circular, and though you have come far, always to the
left, descending to the depths, you have not yet turned through a complete round, so that if
anything new appears to us, it should not bring an expression of wonder to your face."
And I again: "Master, where are Lethe and Phlegethon found, since you do not speak of the
former, and say that the latter is formed from these tears?"
He replied: "You please me, truly, with all your questions, but the boiling red water might well
answer to one of those you ask about. You will see Lethe, but above this abyss, there, on the
Mount, where the spirits go to purify themselves, when their guilt is absolved by penitence."
Dante's Lethe, we find, isn't beneath his feet; it's a cleansing stream in Paradise. (Similar
translocation of a stream from the underground would be declared by H.M. Howell, "Christian

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Chapter 6 -- And Back to the Cross

Educator," author of The Kosmic Problem Solved (1895), who placed the Edenic rivers within the
caves and chasms of ancient Greece. The Pyriphlegethon, however, being of fire and not
suitable for a Christian Educator's Eden, was excluded.)
That there is a measurable difference between body and the soul is made clear when the Stygian
boatman denies Dante passage because of the weight of his body.
To catch the flavor of Dante's poetry, below are excerpts from three English translations.
Longfellow (1867)

Cary (1805)

Mandelbaum (1982)

Beside the woeful tide

of Acheron

The melancholy shore of

Acheron

Upon the dismal shore

of Acheron

Styx

A marsh it makes, which

has the name of Styx

Pyriphlegethon

The river of blood, within

which boiling is whoe'er
by violence doth injure
others

The river of blood

approaches, in the
which all those are
steep'd

Cocytus

Thereby Cocytus wholly

was congealed

Cocytus to its depth

was frozen.

Forming a swamp that

bears the name of Styx

And all Cocytus froze

before those winds

Below is half of Sandro Botticelli's c-1480 Inferno illustration with sins ranked by depth.

Gate of
Hell

River Acheron
Virtuous unbaptized
Lustful
Gluttonous
Hoarders and squanderers
River Styx
Walls of the City of Dis
River Phlegethon
Wood of Suicides
The Abominable Sand

Panderers and seducers

Those who pay for
sacraments and holy office

Flatterers
Those who instigation of lawsuits,

Hypocrites

typically groundless ones

Counselors of fraud

Thieves
Sowers of discord
Lake Cocytus

Falsifiers
Traitors to their kindred,
country, guests and lords

The page following shows slices from Botticelli's work with enlarged details of the boatman, the
topic of Chapter 34, Twenty-Five Centuries of Subterranean Portraits.

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The River Styx.

The River Acheron.

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Chapter 6 -- And Back to the Cross

Below is Bartolomeo di Fruosino's tempera, gold, and silver on parchment (c. 1430). The gates
of Hell are in the center, the scarlet row of open sarcophagi before them. Devils orchestrate the
movements of the wretched souls.

"D" and "V" in the 1544 woodcut are Dante and

Virgil.

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Chapter 6 -- And Back to the Cross

The Inferno's Cocytus is not a river, but
rather a lake, and a frozen one at that. We'll
discuss ice caves in Chapter 42,
Underground Rivers in Caverns other than
Karst, but compared to Gustave Dor's
1890 engraving (right), photographic
illustrations aren't as gripping.

Below are works from the 19th and 20th centuries depicting the travelers overlooking the waters.

Gustave Moreau
Domenico Mastroianni
But are Dante's rivers underground?
Botticelli's is the standard physiographic interpretation of the Inferno's landscape, a funnelshaped pit. The Illustrations of Chapter 34 generally portray sky -- not rock -- arching the scenes,
but that may be because painters prefer light. "Dentro dal monte" is Dante's nod to classical
underpinnings, but his Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon and Cocytus aren't particularly subterranean.
But are Dante's rivers even rivers?
The first English translation, Charles Rogers (1782),
In la palude va cha nome Stige
A marsh it makes known by name of Styx
"Palude" can likewise mean bog, swamp or morass. Dante's Styx is a more-significant deviation
from ancient lore than simply its undergroundedness, to coin a term. The writer bows to the
dictates of Rome where a Charon wouldn't have authority to shepherd the repentant for

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Chapter 6 -- And Back to the Cross

remuneration, a job for which holy ordination is the qualification. Dante's Styx isn't a boundary,
but a quagmire of torment, a circle of Hell itself. The rivers are pools of perpetual punishment.

Styx and Phlegethon from Treatise on AntiChrist, Judgment, Heaven and Hell (c. 14501470).

"The Torments of Hell," Codex of Christoro de

Predis (c. 1486)

Should we thus disqualify the Inferno's Styx as but a sorrowful swamp, not a subterranean river?
No, we shouldn't. Reinterpretation is not redefinition. Subterranean rivers they originally were,
and subterranean rivers they will always be.

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Chapter 6 -- And Back to the Cross

In the manner of earlier chapters, following are correspondences to Homer's saga.

Odyssey (c. 855 BC)

Author
Protagonist
Setting

Opening

Homer

The Divine Comedy (1314)

Dante

Odysseus

Dante

Mythical Mediterranean,
Mythical times

Inferno, Purgatorio and

Paradiso, 1300

Tell me, O muse, of that

ingenious hero who travelled
far and wide after he had
sacked the famous town of
Troy.

Midway upon the journey of our

life I found myself within a
forest dark, For the
straightforward pathway had
been lost.

Lotus Eaters
Characters

Cyclops
Sirens

Hearing the Sirens, thou mayst

be stronger.

Acheron

Ferried across

Cocytus

Lowest circle of Hell, a lake

frozen by the flapping wings of
Lucifer

Styx

Surrounding the lower part of

Hell

Pyriphlegethon

Phlegethon

Rivers

Summary
So let us summarize what transpired in this and the previous two chapters, three segments of
time, each in the range of 500 years.
The early Church assumed a neo-Platonic bent, elevating spiritual understanding above insight
mired in worldly observation. To whatever minor degree the corrupted world merits
consideration, so would hydrology, but the theology demands our attention.
The Arabs preserved a more-phenomenological Aristotelian world view and within that context,
the lore of underground rivers expressed of Greek and Latin writings.
Intellectual vitality, both Arabic and European, came with the recognition of Greek legacy, a
spectrum extending from the highest order of cosmology to the deepest channels within the earth.
Resurgent Christendom emerged more Aristotelian, more empirical. Underground rivers with
mythical underpinning were again instruments of Christian instruction, albeit within the era's
Christian bounds. Ecclesiastes 1:7 remained the pulpit theory of subterranean streams, but an
awakened intellectualism was beginning to seek a broader understanding of the workings of
God's world.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

CHAPTER 7
THE CONCEPT OF CIRCULATION
This chapter, The Copncept of Circulation, and the two following, Subterranean Mechanisms and
Superterranean Metrics, together trace the formation of hydrology as a physically-based science,
and thus a means to assess the flow of water underground.
We could sequentially march through several centuries of scientific history, noting who solved
what challenge at what time. To continue our journey a bit more thematically, however, we'll do it
in three passes.
In this chapter we will follow the concept of circulation through the Renaissance and into the
formative age of science. We will note the problem of rainfall perceived to be less than
streamflow and how a vast subterranean abyss might serve as a logical solution. We will see
how a dual hydrologic cycle seemed to bring everything together.
In the next chapter, Subterranean Engines, we'll concentrate on how subterranean resupply
might work. Perhaps seawater is squeezed upward by the earth's weight. Perhaps it's by
electricity. We'll see some innovative causality when data's not of concern.
And in the following chapter, Superterranean Metrics, we'll note what was realized once
observers began to measure the observables. We'll see rudimentary numbers, but once there
was data, subterranean sea-to-spring piping began to seem less necessary.
We should pause, however, to recall the roots of this chapter in what was fairly well established in
by late-medieval Christian interpretation.
Adelard of Bath (1080-c. 1152) contributed the first full Arabic-to-Latin translation of Euclid's
Elements, a work not printed however, until the 14th
century. To the right, the frontispiece shows a woman
-- Sophia, we might imagine --teaching geometry to
monks.
Adelard's Questiones Naturales, written as a dialogue
between the author and his nephew, includes
questions regarding rivers.
For neither do all rivers flow down into the sea, nor
do none of them. But as some flow down into it, so
also others are born from it. Thus if, while it
receives, it gives back, a perceptible increase in its
volume does not occur. In fact, since many
underground rivers arise from the sea, and the
quaffing of the planets takes away a large part of the
water, some people have been puzzled about how
the sea does not suffer a loss, and how it receives
sufficient water in compensation.

In a circular process there is neither a beginning nor an end. For anything to which this can
apply can be returned into itself. Rivers which flow perpetually, in case you are unaware, have
naturally acquired a circular movement. They therefore return into themselves, and what has
flowed away in their going, they give back by returning. Hence the Satirist, in making fun of the
stupidity of the common people, says:

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

"The country bumpkin waits for the river to flow away, but it flows and will flow, rolling on
forever."
Since the rivers divide into many different courses in the bowels of the earth, it can happen that
they sometimes meet a terrain which is obstructed on all sides by rocky outcrops and forces
them to flow upwards, if the only exit is in that direction. So when they are always ascending,
they always flow out.
Cardinal Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221-1274) preached on the Holy Spirits gift of grace.
Upon this Ecclesiastes: "To the place, whence the rivers go forth, they return." [St. Bernard]
says, that "the origin of springs is the sea, the origin of virtues and sciences is Christ."
For as the spring does not have length, unless it has a continuous conjunction with its origin, so
also light; thus the grace of the Holy Spirit cannot grow in the soul unless through its reversion
to its own original Principle.
The Cardinal likewise is speaking of circulation.
The Renaissance
The term "circulation" derives from the Greek "kirkos" for circle. In generalized mythology, the
circle said to be,
A symbol of the Self. It expresses the totality of the psyche in all its aspects, including the
relationship between man and the whole of nature. It always points to the single most vital
aspect of life, its ultimate wholeness. -- Marie-Louise von Franz in Carl Jung's Man and His
Symbols (1979)
To Jungian psychologists, through decensus and ascensus we find meaning.
We routinely envision the Renaissance -- "rebirth" in Italian, the cultural movement spanning the
14th to 17th centuries -- in terms of art, but our journey is about intellectual forays, in particular
about waters flowing beneath the earth. We'll look at the Renaissance in terms of how it applied
the circle to that question.
As Marjorie Nicolson observes,
No metaphor was more loved by Renaissance poets than that of the circle, which they had
inherited from Pythagorean and Platonic ancestors, who in turn had borrowed it from Orientals,
to whom the serpent, swallowing its tail, was a Hieroglyphick of eternity. The Breaking of the
Circle (1962)
Core to the Renaissance was the rediscovered Greco-Roman culture. By cleaning and
sharpening the tools of antiquity, observers could refocus their own eyes. We must keep in mind,
however, that no eye, then or now, can peer below the earth. The patterns mapped our
consciousness may be significantly unlike what a drilling rig might puncture. The problem of
perception isnt, of course, confined to issues of proper illumination. Science is a story of peering
through the muddle of sensibilities.
Turning from the clerics' abstract speculation about the afterlife, the Renaissance was marked by
interest in the visible, in tactile knowledge. Freed inquiry was more important to the future of
thought than immediate specification.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

The Florentine polymath Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) merits
centerpiece status in our underground sojourn if for no other reason than
his encyclopedic curiosity. Da Vincis primo motore lies squarely within
the Christian god's perceived role for the era. Da Vinci's doctrinal dues
thus paid, he was somewhat of a pantheist, largely excluding the divine
from his musings. Aristotle would have concurred.

The c 1513 sketch shows the

elder artist pondering the flow of
water. The backwards-inscribed
text reads,
Observe the motion of the
surface of the water, how it
resembles that of hair, which
has two motions -- one
depends on the weight of the
hair, the other on the direction
of the curls; thus the water
forms whirling eddies, one part
following the impetus of the
chief current, and the other
following the incidental motion
and return flow.
Despite da Vincis oft-cited, In talking about water, remember to call upon experiment and then
on reasoning, rarely, if ever, did he subject his concepts to physical test, again falling in with
Aristotle. Da Vinci honored the here-and-now, but not to the point of getting his hands wet.
But da Vinci's experimental shortcoming didn't inhibit his greatest strength. "Do you not see that
the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world?" The visual is pre-eminently the real. What da
Vinci saw he never doubted -- Aristotelian to the fullest.
To da Vinci, water is "il vetturale di natura," the vehicle of nature. In his First Book on Water (one
of his few manuscripts written thematically, not as happenstance observations), da Vinci writes.
Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong,
sometimes acid and sometimes bitter,
sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin,
sometimes seen bringing hurt or pestilence,
sometimes health-giving and sometimes poisonous.
It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes.
Unfortunately for focused scholarship, da Vinci's "many places" was indeed many.
If you chose to say that the rains of the winter or the melting of the snows in summer were the
cause of the birth of rivers, I could mention the rivers which originate in the torrid countries of
Africa, where it never rains -- and still less snows -- because the intense heat always melts into
air all the clouds which are borne thither by the winds.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

And if you chose to say that such rivers, as increase in July and August, come from the snows
which melt in May and June from the sun's approach to the snows on the mountains of Scythia
and that such meltings come down into certain valleys and form lakes, into which they enter by
springs and subterranean caves to issue forth again at the sources of the Nile, this is false;
because Scythia is lower than the sources of the Nile, and, besides, Scythia [Asia as far as
India] is only 400 miles from the Black Sea and the sources of the Nile are 3000 miles distant
from the sea of Egypt into which its waters flow.
From da Vinci's writings concerning subterranean waters,
Very large rivers flow underground.
The body of the earth, like the bodies of animals, is intersected with ramifications of waters
which are all in connection and are constituted to give nutriment and life to the earth and to its
creatures. These come from the depth of the sea and, after many revolutions, have to return to
it by the rivers created by the bursting of these springs.
In the chapter to follow we will discuss da Vinci's comments regarding mechanisms of
underground rivers, but for now let us simply note that never was he scientifically correct, and
when his understanding drew close to what we now know, elsewhere he'd argue to the opposite.
Da Vinci's contradictions are understandable in a world where science had yet to be invented.
Why not have multiple reasons for the same behavior? Though da Vinci's subterranean rivers
existed no more in reality than did those of Aristotle, the latter's claims were little but rehashed
mythology. Da Vinci's waters were phenomenological propositions with nary a courteous nod to
Charon.
Concerning the hydrologic cycle, da Vinci employed the circular metaphor of his day.
Thus the movement of the water inside and outside varies in turn, now it is compelled to rise,
then it descends in natural freedom. Thus joined together it goes round and round in
continuous rotation, hither and thither from above and from below, it never rests in quiet, not
from its course, but from its nature.
And,
That which to the utmost admiration of those who contemplate it raises itself from the lowest
depth of the sea to the highest summits of the mountains and pouring through the broken veins
returns to the deep sea and again rises with swiftness and descends again, and so in course of
time the whole element circulates.
Da Vinci turned to the Nile for proof.
And do you not believe that the Nile must have sent more water into the sea than at present
exists of all the element of water? Undoubtedly, yes. And if all this water had fallen away from
this body of the earth, this terrestrial machine would long since have been without water.
Whence we may conclude that the water goes from the rivers to the sea, and from the sea to
the rivers, thus constantly circulating and returning, and that all the sea and the rivers have
passed through the mouth of the Nile an infinite number of times.
Therefore it may be said that there are many rivers through which all the element has passed
and have returned the sea to the sea many times.
By the time of Columbus, there was no opposition to the proposition that the sun was the engine
for the cloud-fed portion of the dual cycle. According to da Vinci,
Moreover the elements repel or attract each other, for one sees water expelling air from itself,
and fire entering as heat under the bottom of a boiler and afterwards escaping in the bubbles
on the surface of the boiling water. And again the flame draws to itself the air, and the heat of
the sun draws up the water in the form of moist vapor, which afterwards falls down in thick
heavy rain.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

And these are carried by the winds from one region to another, until at last their density gives
them such weight that they fall in thick rain. But if the heat of the sun is added to the power of
the element of fire, the clouds are drawn up higher and come to more intense cold, and there
become frozen and so produce hail.
And here, da Vinci is at his best.
The element of fire by its heat always draws to itself damp vapors and thick mists as opaque
clouds which it raises from seas as well as lakes and rivers and damp valleys; and these being
drawn by degrees as far as the cold region, the first portion stops, because heat and moisture
cannot exist with cold and dryness; and where the first portion stops, the rest settle, and thus
one portion after another being added, thick and dark clouds are formed.
At times it is bathed in the hot element and dissolving into vapor becomes mingled with the air,
and drawn upwards by the heat it rises until it reaches the cold region and is pressed closer
together by its contrary nature, and the minute particles become attached together.
We'll return to more of da Vinci's circle-driving inspirations in the chapter to follow, but before we
begin to think mechanically, let us look ahead regarding a darker view of circulation.
Robert Hooke (1635-1703), whose name is applied to the law of elasticity, was the son of a
minister who died by suspending himself." From Hooke's dismally-titled The Earth Grows Old
and Less Fruitful (1705),
Nature... is, as it were, a continual circulation. Water is rais'd in Vapors into the Air by one
Quality and precipitated down in drops by another, the Rivers run into the Sea, and the Sea
again supplies them. Generation creates and Death destroys. Winter reduces which summer
produces... All things almost circulate and have their Vicissitudes.
Hooke imputes no special virtue to the circulatory process; it's simply a law of nature, a glum
Ecclesiastes 1:7 which today we would call it the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The Perception of Precipitation Insufficient to Sustain Streamflow
In beginning of this chapter, we noted a flawed perception, that precipitation is less than
streamflow. No free-thinker standing on the banks of a mighty waterway on a drizzly
Renaissance day thought other than, "Flumen est maioribus quam pluvia." The river flows more
than the rain.
Were water not circulatory -- if water simply came into existence as needed -- the system would
have little need for an underground conduit. And if nature didn't need the latter, there would be
no need for a subterranean resource to supply the underground river.
But as the rivers flow full, there must be the unseen replenishment, and thus there must be the
deeper source.
By 1500, Aristotle, not Plato, was the designated pre-Christian philosopher, but Plato's Tartarean
abyss yet had reason to exist.
And once again we note that it's hard to keep a good story down.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

The Abyss
The concept of a great void in the earth center goes back to
Plato, but its Biblical basis -- depending on how the reader takes
the Bible, of course -- propelled the concept into nearly-modern
times.
To the right is a da Vinci cross-section of the distribution of land,
mountains, oceans, lakes and rivers at the surface and a water
ball in the interior.

In his words,
This is meant to represent the earth cut through in the middle, showing the depths of the sea
and of the earth; the waters start from the bottom of the seas, and ramifying through the earth
they rise to the summits of the mountains, flowing back by the rivers and returning to the sea.
The great elevations of the peaks of the mountains above the sphere of the water may have
resulted from this that a very large portion of the earth which was filled with water, that is to say
the vast cavern inside the earth, may have fallen in a vast part of its vault towards the center of
the earth.
"A vast cavern," to fire our imaginations! We'll see where the fiction writers take the topic in later
chapters.
Arts des Fontaines et Science des Eaux (1665) by Jesuit Jean Franois (1582-1668) endorsed
the presence of great subterranean caverns.
The earth's crust, dried out, ends by cracking. The water underneath expands and exerts
pressure against the vault of the orb, which will break into pieces and fall into the abyss. The
cracked crust, weakened, breaks up; water gushes violently out, in proportion to its mass and
the space it had just occupied.
Jean Franois' student, Ren Descartes (1596-1650)
soldiered and traveled before embracing solitude to pursue
his treatises. His proof of the equivalence of Euclidian
geometry and the algebraic geometry still stands. His
principle of the constancy of universal "momentum," on the
other hand, died with the publication of Newtons Principia in
1687.

As we might expect, the author of Cogito, ergo sum" would apply the power of reason to the
problem at hand. According to Descartes, the sun-like core of the earth was originally
surrounded by a shell of metals which in turn was enclosed by progressive spheres of water,
earth and air. As the inevitable decay of earthly materials began, portions of the shell cracked
and collapsed into the water below, the rocky protrusions becoming the modern continents and
the sunken earth, the sea floor.
The figure below illustrates the process.
But there being many crevices in the body E, which enlarge more and more, they are finally
become so great that it cannot be longer sustained by the binding of its parts, and that the vault
which it forms bursting all at once, its heaviness has made it fall in great pieces on the surface
of the body C. But because this surface was not wide enough to receive all the pieces of this

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

body in the same position as they were before, some fall on their sides and recline, the one
upon the other. -- Discours de la Mthode (1637)

As a result, we may think of the bodies B and F as nothing other than air, that D is the water
and C, a very solid and very heavy crust upon the earth's interior, from which come all the
metals, and finally that E is another, less massive, crust of the earth, composed of stones, clay,
sand, and mud.
Note the resultant sites of D, the water, some upon the surface, other beneath the earth. Plato's
abyss has found a degree of quasi-scientific sense.
Principles of Philosophy (1644),
There are great cavities filled with water under the mountains where the heat of the sun
continually raises vapors which, being nothing more than fine particles of water strongly shaken
one from another, escape through pores in the earth and go to higher plains and mountains,
regroup themselves in the interior of fissures near the surface which when filled, cut through the
soil and form springs which run to the lower valleys, and converge into rivers which flow to the
sea. Now in spite of this process, much water continuously flowing from these cavities under
the mountains never empties them; this is due to the existence of numerous conduits by which
seawater flows to these caverns in the same proportion as that which exits to the springs.
A macabre historical note: After his natural death, Descartes' head was detached from his body
and it was recorded that the anterior and superior regions of his skull were rather small, leading
German phrenologist Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832) to suggest that Descartes could not
have been as great a thinker as previously believed.
As a variation more in keeping with Biblical chronology, Englishman John Woodward (1665-1722)
explained that the earth was a watery spheroid with a solid crust that broke apart and dissolved in
Noachian food to re-sediment into the topography we now know.
There is a mighty collection of Water enclosed in the Bowels of the Earth, constituting a huge
Orb in the interior or central Parts of it; upon the Surface of which Orb or Water the terrestrial
Strata are expanded. This is the same which Moses calls the Great Deep or Abyss; the ancient
Gentile Writer, Erebus, and Tartarus. -- An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and
Terrestrial Bodies, Especially Minerals, as also of the Sea, Rivers and Springs. With an
Account of the Universal Deluge and of the Effects that it had upon the Earth (1695)
Other 17th-century works such Georges Fournier's Hydrographie Contenant la Thiorie et la
Pratique de Toutes les Parties de la Navigation (1667) gave similar accounts of rivers and
reservoirs within earth's interior.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

William Whiston (1667-1752) was the best-known British author
dealing with the genesis of the earth. Succeeding Newton as
Professor of Mathematics in Cambridge, Whiston edited and
published Euclids geometry and wrote textbooks on astronomy
and physics.
Availing himself of Newtonian ideas, Whistons A New Theory
of the Earth, from its Original, to the Consummation of All
Things (1696) explained geological catastrophe, not by human
sin, but by a water-tailed comet which on November 28, 2349
BC which distorted the crust, making "Gaps and Clefts ... quite
through it" and opened "the fountains of the great deep."
The waters eventually receded due to two causes:
First by a wind which dried up some and secondly, by their
descent through those fissures, chaps and breaches, (at
which part of them had before ascended) into the bowels of
the earth, which received the rest. To which later also the
wind, by hurrying the waters up and down, and so promoting
their lighting into the before-mention'd fissures, was very
much subservient.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was of similar opinion regarding a primordial crust floating on a
fluid interior.
Thus the surface of the globe would be capable of being broken and disordered by the violent
movements of the fluids on which it rested.
Ukrainian Johannes Herbinius (1633-1676) Dissertationes de Admirandis Mundi Cataractis et
Subterranis (1678) called the earth a "terraqueous globe," porous, full of cracks, holes, openings,
galleries, tunnels and cracks ("Terra est corpus intern & extern porosum, rimarum, foraminum,
cuniculorum & hiatum plenum"), but hedged regarding causality. The reason for continuous flow
through the great central abyss may be God, angels, stars, the spirit of the earth or perhaps the
air within. Herbinius held that ocean water circulates continuously from the North to the South
Pole via the center of the earth and attributed tides to the periodic ejection of water from
reservoirs beneath the poles. An engraving shows a "Hydrophylacium Subterraneum" but gives
no indication of magnitude.
Concerned with public health, Bernardino Ramazzini (1633-1714) accounted for the wonderful
springs of Modena in De Fontium Mutinensium (1691).
I think 'tis probable the matter is so in our Fountains, to wit, the Water flows out of some Cistern
plac'd in the neighboring Mountains, by subterraneous Passage.
But 'tis, by far, more probable, that the Water is sent from the sea into such Claim, than from
Showers, or melted Snows, seeing Rain and Snow-waters run away for the most part by Rivers
above Ground; neither can they enter into the ground so deep; as Seneca also testifies.
Regarding the origin of waters,
As I have deduced from the Origin of this Water from the Sea, so I do not deny, that many
Fountains owe their Origins to Rains and melted Snow; yet with this difference, that the
Fountain which have their Spring from the Sea by hidden Passages continue perpetual, but
those which run from Showers and temporary Springs at some time of the year, are diminished
and quite dry up.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

I thought beat therefore to fetch the Origin of these Waters from another source, viz. From
some secret Cistern of Water placed in the inner parts of the Apennine Mountains. And it is
certain, that the inner parts of the Mountains are cavernous, and that there are in them Cisterns
of Water, from whence Fountains and Rivers drawn their Origin.
The arms for the springs are two arms, their motto: "Avia, Pervia," the path of the wanderers.
By 1700, geology had evolved into an emerging objective science in which physical observation
demanded logical, mechanistic and consistent explanation. Whereas Biblical accounts could
never -- according to long-held theology, that is -- be false, God's execution of that truth was via
the forces of nature. And in what power of nature might better explain the remnants of prehistory
-- fossils in the mountains, being an example -- than God's direction of water?
Thus the 18th and 19th-century geological theory of Diluvialism, the intellectual attempt to
reconcile the geological record by reference to Noah's Flood.
John Hutchinson (1674-1737) believed all terrestrial matter at creation was suspended in a hollow
spherical mass of water, in the middle of which was a central mass of air. The solid matter then
separated from the water to form a crust over the central air and beneath the water. When light
was ordained, the internal air expanded and burst out, being replaced by the water.
The Flood itself was caused by an increase in atmospheric pressure, produced by God, which
forced air back into the abyss, displacing the water. According to The Philosophical and
Theological Works of John Hutchinson (1749), the water then drained partly through holes in the
bottom of the sea and partly via "Fissures, Swallows, and Cracks in the Strata," eroding them into
caves. He believed similarly that the water of springs and rivers comes from the abyss, rising
through the fissures that had been made by retreating water of the Flood.
Hutchinson's disciple Alexander Catcott noted that the water in Wookey Cave (Chapter 56, The
Tourist Trade Worldwide) "may in some measure indicate the free communication there must be
with the waters in the abyss in this place."
Catcott's work appeared in A Treatise on the Deluge; containing ... Natural Proofs of the Deluge,
Deduced from a Great Variety of Circumstances, on and in the Terraqueous Globe, and ... the
Cause of Caverns or Natural Grottos; with a Description of the Most Remarkable, Especially
those in England (1761).
From the consideration of things upon the surface of the earth, let us now descend into the
inside, and see what proofs we can aduce from thence of an Universal Flood. And here let us
enter the subterranean Kingdom by those easy and convenient passages, -- the natural Caves
and Holes in the Earth: and in the first place collect what evidence we can for the point in
question from the Caves themselves.
Proof that these caverns were formed by water, or, that rapid currents of that fluid have passed
through them, may be drawn from the multitude of in-land pebbles that are to be found in most
of them ... they are not only to be found at the bottoms or in the lower parts of these Caves, but
even high up in the niches and covered cavities in the sides, and many of these pebbles
consist of a different kind of stone from that of the rock of the cavern, so that they must have
come from far, and the streams that brought them been rapid and strong.
The cave-forming action of the violent drainage surged to and fro, thus having repeated effect.
[The water] returned from off the earth continually ... in going and returning; inflowing
backwards and forwards, in fluctuating here and there; for as the Airs began to ascend before
the Waters began to descend, they would of course impede and in part drive back the waters
and so cause afluctuating or reverberating motion in them
The "airs" which occupied the abyss while the water flooded over the earth would have interfered
with the draining down in the manner that water emptied from a flask is interrupted by air bubbles
rising against its flow.
Streams today in caves could not possibly have been responsible for their formation.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

And lest anyone should imagine... that ... swallets in general might have been formed by river
water, let it be remembered that they are commonly found upon the tops of the highest
mountains, especially such as have extensive flats, where neither river nor rain-water could
have any force to tear such Cavities, and therefore they could not owe their origin to such a
Cause.
[Fissures connecting with the abyss] serve as canals for the Water which supplies Springs and
Rivers to run in.
Alexander's brother Georgeheld a similar opinion.
In the Roof of these Caverns, and upper Parts of the Sides, are a great Number of Cavities in
the solid Rock, in Form of inverted Funnels, which as they widen in Proportion to their Depth,
prove they could not have been made by Art [i.e. mining}, (as some have absurdly asserted)
but by the Retreat of the Waters which flow thro' them, into the great Abyss beneath, at the
Time of the universal Deluge.-- A Descriptive Account of a Descent Made into Penpark-Hole
(1772, 1775).
History, Habits, and Instincts of Animals (1835) by William Kirby, one of the Bridgewater Treatises
we'll revisit in Chapter 13, illustrates the persistence of the Abyssians, if we can coin the term.
The word of God, in many places, speaks of an abyss of waters under the earth. Scientific men
in the present day seem to question this.
The author then shows how the Old Testament disproves the "Scientific men of the present," after
which he considers the nature of the abyss itself.
The Hades of Scripture -- usually translated Hell, but distinct from the Gehenna or Hell of the
New Testament -- is synonymous with the abyss. As is further proved by the following passage
of the book of Job.
"Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search of the
abyss? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee, or hast thou seen the gates of the
shadow of death?"
In this passage the springs of the sea, the abyss, the gates of death, and the gates of the
shadow of death, seem nearly synonymous, or to indicate, at least, different portions, of the
womb of our globe. The bottomless pit, or rather the pit of the abyss of the apocalypse, also
belongs to the same place. The word rendered pit means also a well. Schleusner, in his
lexicon, translates the phrase by "Puteus sen fons abyssi," so that it seems to indicate a mighty
source of waters. But as the terms abyss and great abyss are applied to the receptacle of
waters exposed to the atmosphere, as well as to those which are concealed in the womb of our
globe, it is evident that they form one great body of waters in connection with each other.
By this time, however, few scholars saw reason piece together God's doings in that week of
creation. The task at hand for the "Scientific men of the present," was that of finding a model that
explained observable nature.
There was need to reconcile three perceptions regarding rivers.
The circle as an unbroken expression of God's holiness,
An Aristotelian impressions that streamflow exceeds rainfall, and
The Platonic belief in subterranean reservoirs and channels.
The Dual Hydrologic Cycle
As put by Ramazzini, "The arms for the springs are two arms," the hypothesis of the dual
hydrologic cycle.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

Clouds
Evaporation
Precipitation
Rivers
Ocean

Land

Underground
Rivers

Springs

Caverns

The Dual Hydrologic Cycle

The upper loop, that which can be observed upon or above the earth's surface, agrees with
modern pluvial theory, though today we'd include factors such as a box representing vegetation.
The lower loop, that which is within the earth, disagrees with modern evidence, but we not hold it
against those working in an era before evidence was considered. We'll bring the diagram up to
date in Chapter 39, Hydrogeology.
A dual cycle made sense in a time when water was thought to have opposing effects: water from
above eroding of the continents and water from below rejuvenating the mountaintop.
The Tuscan Ristoro d'Arezzo (1223-1283) proposed in his treatise La Composizione del Mondo
(1282) that the central cause of mountains resides with the stars. The heavens have a mountain
and valley character, and where there is a mountain in the heavens, there is a corresponding
valley on the earth. (We will see something similar when we consider the "contrapositionality" of
hollow earth hydrocartography, Chapter 27.) The virtues of the heavens call water to rise as a
magnet attracts iron.
Da Vinci drew upon La Composizione del Mondo, explaining how water washes gravel downslope to raise valley elevations while subterranean streams bear earth upward on a seasonal
basis.
Bernard Varenius, author of Geographia Generalis (1692), the day's standard reference on
physical geography, saw the cycle as dualistic.
Therefore the waters of Fountains proceed partly from the Sea or Subterranean waters, partly
from Rivers, and Dew, that moisten the Earth. But the water of Rivers partly proceedeth from
Springs, and partly from Rain and Snow.
A dual cycle could even explain closed basins, watersheds such as that of the Dead Sea having
no visible outlet to the sea. From Jean Henri Hassenfratz' Les Presses de lEcole des Mines
(1806)
Africa and Asia are in the shape of a cone dug out at the summit. The waters flow out in part
into the center; they are reunited into the great lakes or interior seas from which they are
transported to the sea, either by evaporation, or by underground conduits.
To let the sumps of Africa and Asia drain to the abyss from where flow returns to the sea, we
need only add an upward lower-left arrow to our schematic.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

Clouds
Evaporation
Precipitation
Rivers
Ocean

Land
Springs

Underground
Rivers

Caverns

The Dual Hydrologic Cycle with Ocean Return

Isaac Vossius (1618-1689) was a Latin scholar who edited Plinys Naturalis Historia. Vossius'
Aliorum Fluminum Origine (1666) allowed that caverns in fact might be directly fed by rainwater.
All Rivers proceed from a Colluvies of Rendezvous of Rain-water, and that, as the Water that
falls upon the Hills, gathers more early together, than that which falls in Plaines, therefore it is
that Rivers ordinarily take their Sources from Hills.
Our schematic needs but right-side arrow.

Clouds
Evaporation
Precipitation

Precipitation
Rivers
Ocean

Land
Springs

Underground
Rivers

Caverns
The Dual Hydrologic Cycle with Rain-Fed Caverns
But we'll not advance our schematic beyond the thoughts of the times. The challenge isn't that of
drawing arrows; it is that of explaining how the arrows work.
The diagrams below illustrate the dual mechanisms by which water returns from the sea to
upland streams, Ecclesiastes 1:7 as schematic. The superterranean means was agreed upon by
all -- it is the sun's power that draws water upwards. The motor on the left, the energy propelling
subterranean streamflow -- for of course it's down there -- was yet unknown.

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Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation

Springs

Ocean

As we'll see in the chapter ahead, we've had lots of ideas about circulation. As Ramazzini would
have phrased it, "Avia, Pervia!"

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

CHAPTER 8
TRANSMUTATIONAL AND BIOLOGIC ENGINES
Having arrived on the shores of scientific inquiry, let us take stock of where we've traveled. The
myth of underground rivers has been rooted in Western culture since the time of the Greeks.
According to the Romans, there were many such rivers in distant lands. Reinterpreted in
accordance with medieval theology, belief in such waterways acquired parochial authority.
But few pondered what powers such waters to the elevations of efflux? According to Aquinas,
"streams... in the habit of doing this" are "something that everybody knows."
To Renaissance thinkers, however, the aesthetic of circular watercourses -- down the mountain
slope and back up the interior -- begged for envisionable explanation.
It fell upon infant science, still laden with mythological legacy, but
at last beginning to seek objectivity, to deduce the mechanism of
rivers that were presumed to run underground.
Conceptual mechanization was by no means a straight-forward
process, as noted as late as the 17th century by mathematician,
physicist and magician Gaspar Schott (1608-1666). From his
Anatomia Physico-Hydrostatica Fontium ac Fluminum Explicata
(1663),
Sea water may be carried through subterranean canals to the
surface of the earth and quite frequently to the top of the
highest mountains. How this takes place in something which
hitherto has baffled the minds of all and has led to an almost
interminable amount of conjecturing.
As to what might drive subterranean rivers upward, Schott has
this to say in Athanasii Kircheri (1660), his commentary on a
contemporary with whom we'll soon become better acquainted.

We are of the opinion that some springs and rivers have their origin from subterranean air and
vapors which have been condensed into water. Others from rain and snow which has soaked
into the earth, the greatest number and the most important rivers, however, from sea water
rising through subterranean passages and issuing as springs which flow continuously. And so
the sea is not the only source, at least it does not distribute its water through underground
passages to all these springs and rivers.
But this statement would seem to run contrary to the clear teaching of Holy Writ found in
Ecclesiastes, chapter 1 and verse 7, All rivers run to the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the
place whence rivers cone, thither they return again.
We're well acquainted with the Holy Writ, of course, from Chapter 6, but Schott, who was also a
Jesuit, was in pursue of the "real meaning."
The real meaning of these words however seems to be: All rivers run into the sea, from the
place out of which they come, to it they flow back again. Consequently these which enter the
sea have issued from the sea, and those which have issued from the sea return to it and enter
it that they may flow out of it again. But all enter it and all return to it, therefore all have issued
from it. But it does not follow that some, as we believe, have not come out of the sea by
another road than that just mentioned. I am, therefore firmly of the opinion and again repeat, all

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

rivers do not issue from the sea -- at least all do not make their exit directly out of the ocean into
the depths of the earth and from there rise through subterranean channels to their fountain
heads.
Schott evokes a grab-bag of underground flow mechanisms: up from the sea, except for that
which derives from rain, snow or subterranean air. The era's "conjecturing" was indeed "almost
interminable," but if we step back from the specifics, we find an engaged intellectual community
sorting through the possibilities.
In this chapter we will sort through the first of many propositions easily dismissed in light of what's
now text-book science, but mechanisms seemingly possible to intellectuals newly enamored with
the concept of "mechanism." We'll consider a mechanism attractive to the Platonists, one of
transmutation, and an alternative more attractive to the Aristotelians, a turn to biology.
In the two chapters to follow, we'll introduce explanations somewhat more mechanical, ones
employing heat, force, electricity, topics today we classify as "physics." As Renaissance thinking
didn't preclude wandering rationale, we will encounter da Vinci throughout.
As noted in the introduction, the difference between science and superstition can be slight.
Transmutation

Springs

Ocean
Perhaps ocean water becomes another element, rises through subterranean conduits to
springheads and then reconverts to water. Pythagoras' speech in Ovid's Metamorphoses
proclaims that although the elements have their natural seats, all likewise transmute.
Of these are made, to these again they fall.
Received earth to water rarifies;
To air extenuated waters rise;
To air, when it itself again refines,
To elemental fire extracted shines.
They in like order back again repair;
The grosser fire condenseth into air;
Air into water; water, thickening, then
Grows solid and converts to earth again.
None holds his own: for nature ever joys
In change and with new forms supplies.
A 15th-century representation of the four
elements: fire, air, water and earth

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

When burned, a substance -- wood, for example -- resolves into its elements. The fire is seen by
its own light. Its smoke becomes air. From the ends of wood, water boils off. Ashes are the
nature of earth.
Plato's elements were not distinct substances; they were principles. Fire was not the actual
flame, but rather the principle of combustion. Water was the principle of fluidity; earth, the
principle of solidarity. Air was that which filled vacant space.
Aristotle's universe was -- as we'd expect -- more physical. Finite and spherical, the globe was
made of earth, air, fire and water proportioned 1:10:100:1000. Each element moves naturally in a
straight line -- earth downward, fire upward -- toward its proper place determined by "heaviness."
Terrestrial motion thus must come to a halt. The heavens, on the other hand, move endlessly in
circular motion. The heavens are of a fifth element, either, a superior element incapable of
change other than in circular movement.
Aristotle used the primary qualities of heat cold, moistness and dryness, to explain elemental
natures,
hot + dry = fire
hot + wet = vapor
cold + dry = earth
cold + wet = water
As wetness cools, vapor becomes water. Because it is the
nature of heat to rise, the heat in the vapor ascends to free itself.
The cold in the vapor, having driven away the heat, presses itself
closer together, restoring it to its natural liquid state.

Isidore of Sevilles De Responsione Mundi

(1492) diagrams the primary qualities.

Neo-Platonist Christian mystic Gregory of Nyssa (332-396) pondered the question of Ecclesiastes
1:7. Why does the sea grow no larger? The answer: because God transmutes earth into water
and water into earth.
With the revival of Aristotelian sensibility (Chapter 6), however, transmutation by divine will was
intellectually unsatisfactory. In Lecturae super Genesim (1385), Henry of Langenstein (13631382) proposed a three-fold explanation of springflow that was two-thirds correct. To wit,
Springs issue from pores in the earth in which vapor has condensed or to which water has
seeped from mountain places or has been drawn from within the earth.
The pores also serve as entrance for surface waters returning to the sea.
Some water in deep and obscure pores is influenced by the generative process of the earth
and is transformed into metals and gemstones.
What is meant by "the generative process of the earth" isn't clear, but it's clearly transformation.
Da Vinci accepted elemental transmutation as fact, justifying the occurrence of water at high
elevations as a product of elemental air. Wind is likewise explained where there was water.
The elements are changed one into another, and when the air is changed into water by the
contact it has with its cold region this then attracts to itself with fury all the surrounding air which
moves furiously to fill up the place vacated... But if the water is changed to air, then the air
which first occupied the space into which the aforesaid increase flows must needs yield place in
speed and impetus to the air which has been produced, and this is the wind.

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

In Historia Ventorum (1622), Francis Bacon (15611626) wrote that air emitted from the earth's
interior transformed itself into rain.
Winds do contract themselves into rain,... either
being burthened by the burthen itself, when the
vapors are copious, or by the contrary motions
of winds, so they be calm and mild; or by the
opposition of mountains and promontories which
stop the violence of the winds, and by little and
little turn themselves against themselves; or by
extreme colds, whereby they are condensed
and thickened.

Pierre Cureau de la Chambre (1631-1693),

on the other hand, made the distinction
between constituent and state. From
Discours sur les Causes du Desbordement
du Nil (1666),
When nitre is heated by the heat of the
sun, it ferments and mingling with the
water, troubles it, swells it, and makes it
pass beyond its banks; after the same
manner as the spirits in new wine render
it troubled and make it boil in vessel.

The observation that the nitre (saltpeter) is mingled in the water -- as opposed to being derived
from it -- signals the end of transmutation as hydrologic explanation, however. A quasi-chemical
basis for flooding speaks to the times, if not the fact, but it at least doesn't involve created water.
As more-pragmatic science replaced Plato's natural philosophy, transmutational underground
rivers fell from serious consideration.
Much more attractive were models based on biology, ill-understood as it was, but in the mind of
the Church, an implementation of God's will.

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

Terrestrial Arteries
Springs

Ocean
Plato's analogy between the "macrocosm" of the cosmos and the "microcosm" of humankind
strives to reduce a complex universe into some intelligible scale, and thus give unity to the whole.
Aristotle was a crypto-biologist, seeing the earth a living organism. It took budding mechanists
little effort to follow the philosopher's path -- a macrocosmic earth working as a microcosmic
human body. Our schematic shows da Vincis drawing of a human heart.

Galen (129-199), the most significant

physician of the ancient world after
Hippocrates, believed in two separate tides
of blood, the arterial and the venous,
independently driven by the heart. Arteries
carry the vital spirits to the tissues. Veins
convey the natural spirits.
As an engine for underground rivers, Galens
model of the heart -- pumping ever upward as
it must -- made sense.

Drawing upon an unattributed 13th century

source, William Caxton (1422-1491), the first
English printer, subscribed to the blood model
in Mirror of the World.
All is likewise as the blood of a man goeth
out & issueth in some place, all in likewise
runneth the water by the veins of the earth
and soundeth and springeth out by the
fountains and wells; from which it goeth all
about that, when one delveth in the earth
deep in meadow or in mountain or in valley,
men find water.

The centerpiece of da Vinci's world view was the earth as a living, self-sustaining organism.
From his unfinished Treatise on Water,

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

By the ancients man has been called the world in miniature; and certainly this name is well
bestowed. Inasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, his body resembles that
of the earth.
Da Vinci seems to be preparing to argue for something transmutational, but instead he turns to
metaphor.
So that we might say
That the earth has a spirit of growth;
That its flesh is the soil,
Its bones are the arrangement and connection of the rocks of which the mountains are
composed,
Its cartilage is the porous rock,
And its blood is the springs of water.
The pool of blood which lies round the heart is the ocean,
And its breathing, and the increase and decrease of the blood in the pulses, is represented in
the earth by the flow and ebb of the tide.
Da Vinci recognized, however, the analogical difficulty. While both the globe and the human body
consist of earth, water, air and fire, the correspondence of macrocosm to microcosm can only
work if the globe possesses a mechanism comparable to the heart. Da Vinci came close
discovering the circulation of blood, but in the end, could not break free from Galen.

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

Just as the natural heat of the blood in the veins keeps
it in the head of man, and when the man is dead the
blood sinks to the lower parts, and as when the sun
warms the man's head the amount of blood there
increases and grows so much with other humors, that
by pressure in the veins it frequently causes pains in
the head; in the same way with the springs which
ramify through the body of the earth and, by the natural
heat which is spread through all the -- containing body,
the water stays in the springs at the high summits of
the mountains.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) considered geographical features

not as accumulations of inert matter, but as spirits of life
corresponding to the bones, intestines, veins, arteries, flesh
and nerves of the earth. As explained in De l'infinito Universo
et Mondi (1584), fog, rain, lightning, thunderstorms and
earthquakes are terrestrial diseases. Without underground
rivers, the world would perish for lack of blood. Bruno was
burned at the stake for errors in theology.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), remembered for his gallantry

with Elizabeth I, promoted a doctrine of organic microcosm in
The History of the World (1616), written while imprisoned in
the Tower of London.
[Man's] blood, which disperseth itself by the branches of
veins through all the body, may be resembled to those
waters which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the
earth, his breath to the air, his natural heat to the enclosed
warmth which the earth has itself.
Raleigh saw the hydrologic cycle as an illustration of God's
power, the theme we'll pursue Chapter 13.
For as it is Gods infinite power and everywhere presence ...
that giveth to the sun power to draw up vapors, to vapors to
be made clouds; clouds to contain rain, and rain to fall: go all
Second and instrumental causes, together with nature itself,
without that operative faculty which God gave them, would
become altogether silent, virtueless, and dead.

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

William Harvey (1578-1657) saw the pervasiveness of circular processes in nature as the noblest
form of motion. Like Aristotle, Harvey believed that both sublunary bodies and living organisms
aspire to the pattern displayed by the orbits of heavenly bodies. Harvey's Exercitatio Anatomica
de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (1628) drew attention to the hydrologic cycle.
The moist earth, warmed by the sun, evaporates; the
vapors drawn upwards are condensed, and descending in
the form of rain, moisten the earth again; and by this
arrangement are generations of living things produced...
And so, in all likelihood, does it come to pass in the body,
through the motion of the blood; the various parts are
nourished, cherished, quickened by the warmer, more
perfect, vaporous, spirituous, and, as I may say, alimentive
blood; which, on the contrary, in contact with these parts
becomes cooled, coagulated, and, so to speak, effete;
whence it returns to its sovereign the heart, as if to its
source, or to the inmost home of the body, there to recover
its state of excellence or perfection... [All] this depends on
the motion and action of the heart... The heart,
consequently, is the beginning of life; the sun of the
microcosm, even as the sun in his turn might well be
designated the heart of the world.

Cajetano Fontana wrote in

Instituto Physico-Astronomica
(1695) that fountains rising within
the earth are actuated by anima
of the Geocosmos, the economy
of nature, just as human blood is
moved by the anima of vital
principle.

Reluctant to be retired, the arterial analogy received a

hearing in London's Royal Society as late as 1736 when
Christopher Packe (1686-1749) commended glowingly the
"concerted Regularity of the valleys in Kent, likening them
to the veins of the body, and hinted at a subterranean
network of channels, "analogous to the arteries,"
published the year following as Dissertation upon the
Surface of the Earth, as Delineated in a Specimen of a
Philosophico-Chorographical Chart of East Kent.

In retrospect, analogy to human blood wasn't bad science for Leonardo's day. It mimicked
observable natural function and, like Newtonian physics, sought physical law independent of
scale. The model's persistence for another two centuries is more difficult to justify, however.

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

The Urinary Tract
Springs

Ocean
The urinary-tract model never got too far. Were it not associated with a respected scientist, we'd
drop it from our list, but on the other hand, it's creative.
German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) called the moving cause of planets an anima
motrix (moving soul) in his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). Although in the second edition
he replaced anima by vis (force), his Harmonices Mundi (1619) persisted with the metaphor.
The globe contains a circulating vital fluid... Every
particle of it is alive. It possesses instinct and volition
and even the most elementary of its molecules, which
attract and repel each other according to sympathies
and antipathies. Each kind of mineral substance is
capable of converting immense masses of mater into its
own peculiar nature, as we convert our aliment into flesh
and blood. The mountains are the respiratory organs of
the globe, and the schists its organ or secretion.
Kepler's metabolic model was well suited for the passage
of subterranean waters.
The Earth forever drinks in water from the sea... and
that groundwater and springs are the end products of
the Earth's metabolism.
As urine from the bladder, rivers flow from the
mountains.
Kepler is best remembered for his heliocentric laws of planetary motion, not his insight regarding
geohydrology.

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Chapter 8 -- Transmutational and Biologic Engines

The Earth's Sap
Springs

Ocean
While the early mechanists were more likely to envision the earth as an animal, not a vegetative
organism, the vine metaphor was sometimes employed to describe underground streams.
Da Vinci suggested that spring water rises from the low roots of the vine to its lofty head, falls
through the cut branches upon the roots and mounts anew to the place whence it fell." His
evidence was as follows.
The same cause which stirs the humors in every species of animal body and by which every
injury is repaired, also moves the waters from the utmost depth of the sea to the greatest
heights and just as the water [sap] rises from the inferior parts of the vine to the cuts higher up.
Likewise the water that rises from the low roots of the vine to its lofty head falls through the cut
branches upon the roots and mounts anew to the place whence it fell.
As the water rises from the lowest part of the vine to the branches that are cut, so from the
lowest depth of the sea the water rises to the summits of mountains, where, finding the veins
broken, it pours out and returns to the bottom of the sea.
We've modeled underground rivers powered by both transmutation and biology, but there are
ever so many more possibilities.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

CHAPTER 9
THERMODYNAMIC ENGINES
This chapter deals with underground rivers powered by heat, but in before we ignite the hearth,
we need an ample reservoir of water.
Hydrophylacia
Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), a prolific polymath, was the worlds first scientist to support
himself through his writings. His syncretistic scholarship paid little attention to disciplines. A
Jesuit living in an age still rocked by Reformation, Kircher heeded the Holy Scriptures, but from
Kircher's viewpoint, a "Turris Babel" reaching the heavens seemed impractical. By his reckoning,
it would require 3,000,000 tons of building material just to reach the moon. But worse, the edifice
would pull the earth from the center of the universe.
Kircher's two-volume Mundus Subterraneus (1665) was
the first printed work on geophysics. Not constrained
by its title, however, the work included maps of the
solar surface, global ocean circulation and Atlantis.
Regarding the subterraneus,
The Underground World is a well framed house with
distinct Rooms, Cellars, and Storehouses, by great
Art and Wisdom fitted together.
Kircher's theory of holes on the ocean floor connecting
to underground brooks was embellished with mention
dragons and gargantuan lizards.

Kircher's most-dramatic contribution to geologic graphic art is the hollow-mountain water cavern,
the "hydrophylacium," "phylacium" being Latin for "storehouse." That Kircher placed such
caverns above sea level suggests that he believed them to drain by gravity.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

Mundus Subterraneus was widely reprinted with altered
graphics, but no matter the particular artist, the
hydrophylacia are central to the composition. Three of the
four illustrations shown here are geographically explicit.

We'll look more closely at the lower-left illustration in Chapter 14, Fountains of the Nile.
The hydrophylacia model was old, however, even in Kircher's era. Conrad von Megenberg's Das
Buch der Natur (1349-1351), the first illustrated book on nature, included a description of the bigcavity hydrology.
Some [waters] originate in the big hollow mountain which is cold and rocky. The watery steam
dissolves here into water drops which mix with the soil, with the daily rain and the snow. So the
water drops collect in the cavities and form a rivulet; many rivulets form a big stream which
seeks an exit from the mountain and eventually breaks through. This is the spring of flowing
waters or of a well on the mountain, or a lake on the mountain.
As the hydrophylacia are above sea level, Kircher needed to explain how seawater attained the
elevation. The fact that that temperature increases with depth in dry mines guided his ideas.
The central fire pours out surging and burning exhalations to each and every part by firecarrying channels. Striking the water-chambers it forms some into hot springs. Some, it
reduces to vapors which, rising to the vaults of hollow caves, are there condensed by cold into
waters which, released at last, give rise to springs and rivers.
An event in 1678 seemed to support the existence of hydrophylacia. Flash flooding of the
Garonne River, which issues from a spring in the Pyrenees, without there having been local
rainfall, was attributed to collapse within the mountain displacing an underground lake.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

So this Mass of the Mountain in its settling all at once upon the Water of the Gulphs or
Subterraneous Lakes, which are under the highest Pyrenean Mounts ... do force the Water to
gush out all together with great violence to the same quantity with the Bulk of that part of the
Mountain which is settled into the Subterraneous Lakes, which is the cause o/this Prodigious
over flowing.
A dye study described in Chapter 49 would later show the Garonne's subterranean reach
involves no such hydrophylacium, but Chapter 49 wouldn't have been available at the time.
For centuries to follow, Kircherian drawings -- the
cavernous hydrophylacia being a trademark -have proven to be almost impossible to suppress.
We cite, for illustration, "Popular Geology, a
Complete Summary of the Science, with Many
Illustrations," engraved by John Emslie, published
in Reynolds' Twelve Geological Diagrams (1860),
a portfolio of plates to be passed around a lecture
hall or posted for edification.

The enlargements of the lower left and right

figures bear the hydrophylacia stamp of our
irrepressible Jesuit.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

Section of a Reciprocating Spring

Section of a Geyser

The rain by percolating the rock fills the

cavity A until it reaches the top of the bend B,
the spring will then flow until the water is
exhausted, the same phenomena being
again repeated.

The water percolating the rock fills the

cavity A and becoming greatly heated by
volcanic action, steam is formed, which by
its elastic force drives the water up the
channel B whence it issues as a fountain.

Descartes (Chapter 7), a Kircher contemporary who equated Jesuitical intellectualism with the Inquisition
that imprisoned Galileo and executed Bruno, described Kircher as "more quacksalver than savant."
If Kircher was quacksalver -- a charlatan -- he was at least an engaging quacksalver.
A hydrophylacium may also be required for non-thermal geophysical engines of underground
flow, but we'll get to those possibilities in the chapter to follow.
The Heat of the Earth
Springs

Ocean
We show three mechanisms -- fire, an alembic and condensation -- which while together
describing the same physical process, were differently emphasized by early writers.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

Mt. Etna had a major eruption in 475 BC and another in 396. In 1669, lava destroyed the town of
Nicolosi and Catania. Other pre-1800 eruptions occurred in,
1797-1801, 1791-93, 1787, 1780-81, 1776, 1770, 1763-67, 1752-59, 1747-49, 1744-45, 173536, 1732-33, 1723-24, 1702, 1693-94, 1688-89, 1682, 1651-56, 1646-47, 1643, 1633-38, 161424, 1603-10, 1595, 1579-80, 1566, 1554, 1540-41, 1536-37, 1494, 1446-47, 1444, 1408, 1381,
1350, 1333, 1329, 1284-85, 1250, 1222, 1194, 1169, 1164, 1160, 1157, 1063, 1044, 1004,
911, 859, 814, 812, 644, 417, 252, 80, 39, 10 AD and 10, 32, 36, 44, 49, 56, 61, 122, 126, 135,
141, 350, 396, 424-25, 476-79, 565, 695, 735 and 1500 BC.
Mt. Vesuvius near Campania is one of the world's most dangerous volcanoes. Pre-1800
eruptions occurred in,
1796-1822, 1783-94, 1770-79, 1764-67, 1744-61, 1732-37, 1724-30, 1712-23, 1706-08, 170104, 1696-98, 1685-94, 1682, 1654-80, 1637-52, 1631-32, 1500, 1347, 1270, 1150, 1139, 1073,
1049, 1037, 1007, 999, 991, 968, 787, 685, 536, 512, 505, 472, 379-95, 222-35, 203, 172, 79
AD and 1500 BC.
The Island of Stromboli, north of Sicily, has been in almost continuous eruption for over 2,000
years. Larger than normal eruptions over the recent 240 years include those of,
2006, 2003, 1998-2000, 1993-96, 1989-90, 1985-1986, 1975, 1971, 1966-68, 1959, 1956,
1949-54, 1943-44, 1941, 1936-37, 1934, 1930, 1919, 1915, 1912, 1905-07, 1903, 1900, 189598, 1891-1893, 1888-89, 1885, 1881-82, 1879, 1874, 1855, 1850, 1833, 1822, 1778, 1770 and
1768.

Mt. Vesuvius

Stromboli

Mt. Etna

To speculators steeped in classical history, the earth's igneous power seemed more than
sufficient to pump hillside fountains. Da Vinci argued initially that water is drawn upwards through
subterranean passages by the heat of the sun, but the heat source did not please da Vinci for two
reasons.
As mountain crests are closer to the sun, flowing water shouldnt be frigid.
The solar engine should work best in the summer when water is warmer, but the summer is
often when springs diminish.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

Aware of the 1494 Mt. Etna eruption and the 1500 event of Mt. Vesuvius, da Vinci turned toward
an interior fire as a better explanation of spring water.
Now the same heat which holds up so great a weight of water as is seen to rain from the
clouds, draws them from below upwards, from the foot of the mountains, and leads and holds
them within the summits of the mountains, and these finding some fissures, issue continuously
and cause rivers.
And this water, which passes through a closed conduit inside the body of the mountain like a
dead thing, cannot come forth from its low place unless it is warmed by the vital heat of the
spring time. Again, the heat of the element of fire and, by day, the heat of the sun, have power
to draw forth the moisture of the low parts of the mountains and to draw them up, in the same
way as it draws the clouds and collects their moisture from the bed of the sea.

Da Vinci suggests how seawater can rise toward a mountain peak because of subterranean fire.
The heat of the spirit of the world is the fire which pervades the earth, and the seat of the
vegetative soul is in the fires, which in many parts of the earth find vent in baths and mines of
sulphur, and in volcanoes, as at Mount Aetna in Sicily, and in many other places.
Georg Bauer (1494-1555), "Agricola," recognized in
De Ortu et Causis Subterraneum (1546) that springs
are largely supplied by rainwater, but,
Being heated it can continually give off halitus
[steam], from which arises a great and abundant
force of waters. Halitus rises to the upper parts of
the canales, where the congealing cold turns it
into water, which by its gravity and weight again
runs down to the lowest parts and increases the
flow of water if there is any.
If any find its way through a canales dilatata [expanded] the same thing happens, but it is
carried a long way from its place of origin. The first phase of distillation teaches us how this
water is produced, for when that which is put into the ampulla is warmed it evaporates, and this
balitus rising into the operculum is converted by cold into water, which drips through the spout.
In this way water is being continually created underground.
And so we know from all this that of the waters which are under the earth, some are collected
from rain, some arise from balitus, some from river-water, some from seawater; and we know
that the halitus is produced within the earth partly from rainwater, partly from river water, and
partly from seawater.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

In Meteorologicorum Libri VI (1627) Belgian

Libert Froidmont (1587-1653) described
mountains as alembics, a distillation
apparatus familiar to alchemists.

In his Architettura d'Acque (1656), Giovanni

Battista Barattieri endorsed the geological
alembic, although he included melting snows
contribution to springflow based on
observation.

On a visit to southern Italy, Kircher -- who surely knew of the igneous demise of Pliny the
Younger (Chapter 3) -- was lowered into the crater of Mt. Vesuvius, then on the brink of eruption,
to examine its interior. More fortunate than Pliny, the Jesuit emerged alive.
The driving force in Mundus Subterraneus is the central fire, diffusing with igneous exhalations
heated water from hydrophylacia filled with water, fog or air converted to steam, which, in turn
rise to the highest mountains.
[The] Associates, and Agents of Nature [fire and water] sweetly conspire together in mutual
service, with an inviolable friendship and wedlock, for the good of the whole in their several and
distinct private-lodgings... [creating] minerals, juyces, marles, glebes, and other soyls, with
ebullitions, and bubblings up of fountains.
Kircher accused Aristotle of opposing scripture by denying that springs and rivers originate in the
sea, but remained Aristotelian in terms of causal structure.
The formal cause is fire.
The material cause is Sulphur, Bitumen, Pit-Coals, and also Allom, Salt, Nitre, Coaly Earth,
and Calcanthum or Vitriol, and such kind of Metals. in the dark recesses.
The instrumental cause is the Cavernous nature of the place... oppressed with Sulphureous
Smoak and Soot.
The efficient cause consists of Winds and Blasts from the cavernous interior.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

Kircher's graphics catch the
flavor of the fiery
underground. Pyrophylacia
(fire caverns) connect with
the earths "central fire"
through a network of
chambers, underground
reservoirs, fountains and
twining passages through
which water and lava
escape to the surface.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

Kircher included the seabed as a source of

springflow because snow and rainfall are
seasonal, whereas rivers are not. To disprove
the mechanism of subterranean condensation,
he referred to the lake at Mt. St. Gotthard
lacking the covered vault that condensation
would necessitate.

As an orientologist (among his myriad of

interests), Kircher pursued reports from his
fellow Jesuits regarding far-off Asia. His
illustration in China Monumentis (1667) is
another case of the fiery global engine.

Thomas Robinson's The Anatomy of the Earth (1694) and New Observations on the Natural
History of the World of Matter (1696) described vapors from the sea condensing into mountain
showers that cause rivers to flood. Other waters move upward through a maze of subterranean
dikes to mountain tops where they emerge as springs.
Robinson rehashed da Vincis analogy between the bursting forth of mountain top fountains and
the breaking of a blood vessel. Mountain tops, Robinson instructs, are more subject to accidents
(tempests and thunder) than are flat plains where the veins are thickly buried.
The windings and turnings of the greater Veins... through which the whole mass of
subterranean Water Circulates. The Lesser Fibers, or Ramifactions, filling all the flat Strata
with feeders of Waters, which breaking out upon the Surface of the Earth cause Springs.
And thus, in our Bodies, tis much easier to break a Vein in the Neck or Arm, where they lye
nearest the skin; than in the Buttocks, or any other such Fleshy-part.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

Robinson's diagram explains the matter.
A
B
C
D
E
F

Central Fire
Mountains
Heaths
Plains
Channels of the Sea
Seas with rivers flowing into them
from the tops of mountains
swelling them into a Gibbosity
and causing in them a Continual
Fermentation.
G Vapors arising from the Seas

Johann Joachim Becher's theory, put

forth in Physica Subterranea (1669),
placed the evaporation in a single
cavity at the globe's center, the
Abyss, not in individual caverns
beneath mountains. Condensation,
on the other hand, mostly occurs
inside mountains because hills are
more cavernous than the rest of the
earth.

The first occasion on which the condensation theory can be

traced to actual observation in a cave was when Nicolas Steno
(1638-1686) wrote in Canis Carchariae (1669)
I have seen an abundance of water dropping from many
caverns where every part of both roof and floor was solid.
The water could not have come through the rock but must have
"condensed from the upper atmosphere ... which I believe is
very common."

Apart from their comparisons of rainfall and streamflow, Perrault and Mariotte (Chapter 12,
Superterranean Metrics) discussed how springs could maintain a reasonably-constant rate.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

Perrault, perhaps influenced by Steno, argued the case for subterranean condensation in De
lOrigine des Fontaines (1674).
It is reasonable to believe therefore that in the earth evaporation takes place which can
produce water, either through heat communicated by the Sun ... or by cold or by currents of air
within the earth, The water which occurs in caverns and channels at the foot of mountains is
thus raised inside them to their summits where, because of the numbing induced by the cold
which it encounters, is reduced to little drops of water, which join with each other" and so
appear as springs.
In The Motion of Water and Other Fluids ... Being a Treatise of Hydrostaticks (1718), Mariotte
dismissed the capacity of condensation, and in any case "it is deny'd that there are many such
hollow places in mountains," a refutation of the entire hydrophylacia concept.
The alembic theory of mountain springs faded, but as will be noted in Chapter 48, Subterranean
Geophysics, the fiery-earth model is part-and-parcel of modern geophysics.
A fire smoldering within a cavern nicely, if incorrectly, explains
the report in Adams County [Iowa] Free Press, October 18,
1913.
A peculiarity of some of the streams on Switzerland is that a
number of them have their source from canyons which are
underground passages. One at Ragaz, known as the
Taminaschlucht, comes out at the foot of a mountain, and a
foot way has been constructed so that it may be entered for a
distance of about half a mile to a place where the stream
gushes our of a subterranean opening to its full capacity, and
at one side there is a second opening from which hot water
flows.
The Taminaschlucht gorge is 100 meters deep and 10 meters
wide. A tunnel leads to a grotto having a 37C thermal spring.
In at least this instance, hypothesizers of hot and cold
subterranean plumbing were close to the mark.
What we now know of geophysics supports in loose degree even a transmutational basis for
springflow, if one allows chemical reactions to count as transmutation. Some hot-spring effluent
is "juvenile," newly formed by volcanic or tectonic processes.

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Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines

While condensation may be inconsequential in most groundwater
environments, again the early speculators were onto a legitimate idea.
The micro-hydrologic water balance in large cave systems -- especially
ones in which there are large differences in temperature -- can be
significant. In certain Crimean and Caucasian karst regions, between
0.1 and 20 percent of dry-season runoff is said to be derived from
subterranean condensate, the illustration to the right serving as an
illustration.

The heat of the earth does not drive underground rivers uphill, but in limited cases, geothermal
energy plays a role in groundwater flow. The hydrophylacia so well advertised by Kircher do not
exist, but again in select cases, subterranean streamflow passes through mammoth subterranean
cavities.
And we're not done with subterranean hydrologic engines, or at least imaginative propositions for
the task.

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Chapter 10 -- Geophysical, Pneumatic and Electromagnetic Engines

CHAPTER 10
GEOPHYSICAL, PNEUMATIC AND ELECTROMAGNETIC
ENGINES
This chapter concludes our survey of misdirected explanations for the mechanism of
subterranean streamflow. We will discuss nine additional hypotheses, all physically based, at
least in superficial sense. The flaws in some schemes are apparent to the modern eye; others
may appear plausible until a few numbers are crunched. All, however, made sense to
progressive thinkers of their own day.
Our engines will derive from
Terrestrial Asymmetry,
The Weight of the Sea,
Siphoning,
Sloshing,
The Earth's Compressibility,
Capillary Action,
Earthquakes,
Pneumatics and
Electromagnetism
While several of the above inter-relate, their proponents may not have recognized the relation
and we wish to do our best to look -- at lest for a moment -- through the eyes of the advocates.
Terrestrial Asymmetry
Springs

Ocean

If the sea were higher than the land, ocean water would flow downhill to the mountaintops.
Job 37:10, Jeremiah 5:22 and Proverbs 8:29, assuring that God fixed the seas boundaries so
that it will not overflow the land, were sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of most medieval thinkers
gazing from the shore. The eye arbitrates what seems level and the arc of horizon indeed looks
high.
But for Christians drawn to natural philosophy, there must be a physical rule to which the Biblical
speaks.

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Chapter 10 -- Geophysical, Pneumatic and Electromagnetic Engines

The first physically-based theory of the separation of sea and land was a marvelous exercise of
human intellect. Jean Buridan (1295-1358) was a disciple of William of Ockham, remembered for
the principle of ontological parsimony, Ockhams Razor.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
When competing explanations seem equally plausible, the simpler is more likely to be correct.
In Compendium totius Logicae, Buridan proposed that the earth is asymmetric, such that land
occupies most of one hemisphere and oceans occupy primarily the other (plausible, given the
geographic knowledge of the day). The geocentric requirement of his times -- that the earth lies
at the center of the universe -- posed a problem, however, as sediment accumulation at the
bottom of the sea would shift the earths center of mass. To remain universally centered, the
earth must thus shift as a whole towards the land hemisphere, raising it out of the water and thus
rebuilding the mountains.
Albert of Saxony (1316-1390), primarily a logician (as opposed to a natural philosopher) extended
the offset-spheres model. Appealing to the authority of his revered masters from the Faculty of
Arts at Paris, his Questiones in Aristotelis Libros de Caelo et Mundo explained earthquakes, tidal
phenomena, and geology in terms of an asymmetry preordained by God since eternity for the
good of animals and plants.
Da Vinci's off-center geosphere didn't require God's ordination. The figure below, a labeled
version of the sketch he used to illustrate the idea, shows why the sea remains offshore, and why
the pipe is downhill from ocean to mountain slope.
Continent
Land Surface
Sea Level
Center of Terrestrial Globe

Center of Sphere of Water

Sea Floor
Ocean Surface

Downhill Pipe to Mountaintop

Sea
Perhaps you will say that water can only rise the same distance as it descends; and that the
surface of the sea is higher than the summits of the highest mountains. The answer to this is
that the exact opposite is the case, for the lowest part visible to the sky is the surface of the
sea, since water does not move of itself unless to descend, and so descends when it moves; as
therefore the rivers which stretch from the summits of the mountains to the sea are everywhere
in movement they are therefore everywhere descending, and when they come to the sea they
stop and end their movement; for which reason one must conclude that they arc stationary in
the lowest reaches of the river.
In another twist of the higher-than argument, da Vinci argued,
The Mediterranean Sea, a vast river placed between Africa, Asia, and Europe, gathers within
itself about three hundred principal rivers, and in addition to that it receives the rains which fall
upon it over a space of three thousand miles. It returns to the mighty ocean its own waters and
those that it has received; but doubtless it returns less to the sea than what it receives; for from
it descend many springs which flow through the bowels of the earth and vivify this terrestrial
machine. This is so because the surface of this Mediterranean is farther from the center of the
world than the surface of this ocean.
It would take the simplicity of Newtonian physics to explain that even if the earth were
asymmetrical (which to some degree it is), there's only one downhill direction.

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Chapter 10 -- Geophysical, Pneumatic and Electromagnetic Engines

Weight of the Sea
Springs

Ocean
Perhaps the sea's very weight propels underground rivers. Heraclitus, a Greek we met in
Chapter 2, was onto the concept, but again we'll jump to da Vinci.
Da Vinci's two illustrations of hydrostatic pressure are shown below. The sketch on the left,
clearly representing underground channels, is fundamentally incorrect, as the parabolic outflow
trajectories are independent of elevation. The right-hand sketch, however, catches the
distinction. The red overlay shows what hydrostatic theory predicts.

Aristotelian humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger's (1484-1558) posthumous Commentaries on

Theophrastus' de Causis Plantarum (1566) argued that springs result from the infiltration of sea
water into the earth under the pressure of the oceans.
Daniel Sennert (1572-1637), Clbre Professeur de Mdecine Wittenberg proposed in Epitome
Naturalis Scientiae (1651) that aided by tides, the weight of the ocean could push water to the
mountain tops.

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Chapter 10 -- Geophysical, Pneumatic and Electromagnetic Engines

It's the "hydrostatic paradox" in which the larger weight on
the diagram's left forces water down and around the
narrow neck where the weight is less, pushing it up and
from the orifice at the top.
The weight-of-the-sea hypothesis wasn't long held,
however.

Robert Fludd (1574-1637) was an influential kabbalist, an alchemist in modern parley. The
chaotic four elements in his theory of Macrocosm and Microcosm were heat, chill, moisture and
dryness. The four aspects are heat (life), light (mind), electricity (kamic), and the synthetic
essences.
A water-powered pump was
described by Fludd in De
Naturae Simia Seu Technica
Macrocosmi Historia, likely
inspired by what he may have
observed in German mine
works. While Fludd is
remembered for his esoteric
theories, this particular
machine not a scheme for
perpetual motion.

De Naturae Simia Seu

Technica Macrocosmi Historia
(1618)

To the right, a sketch of Fludd's

pump from Descriptive and
Historical Account of Hydraulic
and Other Machines for
Raising Water (1850) by
Thomas Ewbank. Water is
dumped in at a given elevation
and water from another source
(presumably of better quality) is
drawn up to a lower elevation.
To put it concisely, A is above
B.

We include the pump as evidence that by the 17th century, even a kabbalist was aware that a
closed system consumes more energy than it yields.

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Chapter 10 -- Geophysical, Pneumatic and Electromagnetic Engines

In De Fontium Fluviorumque Origine ex Pluviis (1713), Danish
naturalist Thomas Bartholini (1616-1680) saw the same
constraint.
Furthermore, that no fountains ever burst forth at the summit of
a mountain, or near its head; but that always some portion of
still higher land from which water may be supplied to them,
overtops the fountains.
Another subterranean motor discarded.

Discarded, but to yet lurk.

Following are two pieces from the 1800s, long after the weight-of-the-sea model had been refuted
by Newtonian physics. Refuted, perhaps, but still marketable.
"On the Cause of Fresh Water Springs, Fountains, &c.," American Journal of Science and Arts,
July 1828, by Joseph Du Commun,
In the Harmony Gazette, November 21, 1827, there is a "Nut for the philosophers," picked, it is
said from the National Gazette. I have endeavored to crack it, and I now present you with the
kernel, leaving to your taste to determine whether it is palatable.
The questions proposed are two in number, 1st, Why the fresh water issuing from the depth of
two hundred and twenty feet, by boring in solid rock near the city of New Brunswick, rises from
eight to fourteen feet above the surface of the Raritan river? and 2d, Why the quantity of water
corresponds exactly and continually with the rising and falling of the tide?
lf we take an inverted glass siphon ACB and pour water into it, the two
sides will be filled in part, and the water will rise in each side to the same
height, say a and b.
Note the "inverted." While Du Commun's overall argument may be
faulted, the adjective, as we will note in Chapter 46, is correctly employed.
If instead of water, we introduce mercury in the branch A and rain water
in the branch B, one inch of mercury at m will support above thirteen
inches of water in the branch B.
And lastly, if in the branch A we have a fluid denser than common water,
as salt water for instance, the column of fresh water will be supported in
the branch B, at the height b, by a column of the salt water inferior to it in
height, in the inverse ratio of their densities, say to the height c only.
But now, cannot the branch B, of our siphon represent the subterranean
stream winding through the crevices of the rocks, until it reaches, at
some depth or other, the great oceanic reservoir, and cannot the column
of salt water in the branch A represent, in like manner, the height and
pressure of the salt water of the ocean?

If so, it explains why the fresh water, in boring by the sea shore, is raised and flows above the
level of the sea water; thus, one of the two given questions seems to be solved.

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The answer to the second may be deduced from the same principle.
Let us suppose that a hole has been opened in the branch B, a little below lb the level of the
water at ebb; the water will then flow with a velocity that may be represented by l, but at high
tide the water might be supported at the height h, if the opening in the tube did not permit it to
flow out, and it then must flow with the same velocity as if pressed under a column of fluid of
that elevation. The quantity of water so running may be as 3, 4, 5, &c. according to the height
of the tide; and finally, it must continually and exactly follow its oscillations.
To these considerations several might be added, for example: Knowing the proportional
densities of the fresh water and the sea water, and the difference of the two levels, to
determine at what depth the subterranean stream empties itself in the ocean. If we calculate
the particular case here given, we shall find, the density of fresh water being represented by
1000, that of sea water by 1029 (Dr. Murray,) the difference of the levels being fifteen feet, we
shall find, I say that the depth at which they join underground must be five hundred feet.
Thence it follows, that if the junction of the two different kinds of water should take place at five
thousand feet, or one mile, below the surface, the fresh water should rise at one hundred and
fifty feet; if at fifty thousand feet, or ten miles, as one thousand five hundred feet, &c. This l
think may account for the springs on high ground, and even at the top of insulated mountains.
Though diagram is hydrostatically correct; its hydrodynamics are not. Once the U-tube
equilibrates, fresh (i.e., less dense) water ceases to enter.
Were the ocean the cause of springflow, it stands to reason that tidal effects would be noted.
From "Wonderful Underground Streams," Salt Lake Herald, August 22, 1897,
A remarkable new theory concerning the nature of parts of the earth's interior has just been
promulgated by Professor F.H. King agricultural physicist of the University of Wisconsin. It is to
the effect that the subsurface of the human footstool is interpenetrated by water incessantly in
motion that there is a vast network of underground rivers, brooks, streams, pools and rivulets
constantly flowing in various directions, some shallow, some deep, some near the surface
some far below the outer crust, all of them having a definite tidal motion and all subject to lunar
influence.
It is not stated whether there is any intimate
connection between these underground
streams and the great streams and bodies of
water which exist on the surface except that
they are both governed by lunar influence and
that the natural process of percolation may
indirectly connect them with each other... It is
a contention of Professor King that the
underground waters embrace a worldwide
zone. They are not, therefore, confined to the
United States alone but undermine the
surfaces of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia
as well. Professor King is working to perfect
a map of the underground streams of the
world and as soon as he has finished we shall
doubtless know more of what the interior of
the earth is like.
To the right, "Recording Oscillations of
Underground Streams with a Chronograph."
The promised map and chronographic measurements are yet to be published.

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Siphoning
Springs

Ocean

Da Vinci liked the idea of siphoned underground waters. It's his artwork in the graphic.
The water of the ocean cannot make its way from the bases to the tops of the mountains which
bound it, but only so much rises as the dryness of the mountain attracts. And if, on the
contrary, the rain, which penetrates from the summit of the mountain to the base, which is the
boundary of the sea, descends and softens the slope opposite to the said mountain and
constantly draws the water, like a siphon which pours through its longest side, it must be this
which draws up the water of the sea.
"Which pours through its longest side" indicates that da Vinci understood the principle.
Thus if s-n were the surface of the sea, and the rain descends from the top of the mountain a to
n on one side, and on the other sides it descends from a to m, without a doubt this would occur
after the manner of distilling through felt, or as happens through the tubes called siphons.
Distilling through felt would seem to refer to capillary action, a mechanism discussed shortly, but
da Vinci was one to cover all bases.
Much more has been speculated regarding siphoned springflow, but for that we'll wait until
Chapter 46. Needless to say, of course, is that it doesn't trump gravity.
Sloshing

Springs

Ocean
Of Kircher's several -- and sometimes conflicting -- geologic explanations for springflow, one
involves seawater drawn into the earth's interior at the North Pole and expressed at the South
Pole. (We've a map of the route in Chapter 16, The Maelstrom, and will thrill to tales of
adventurous descents into such passages in Chapters 17-26) Subterranean sloshing causes the
tides which in turn surge seawater through hidden channels to upland springs. High winds
hasten the process

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Kircher wasn't alone in the idea of sloshing seas. The working
title for Galileo Galilei's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief
World Systems (1632) was Dialogue on the Tides in which he
attributed tidal action to water sloshing due to the Earth's
movement around the sun.
Galileo's interest was of, course, far above the earth sciences,
but where an observation related to the latter might bolster the
case for heliocentrism, Galileo found hydrology to be a useful
science..

The Earth's Compressibility

Springs

Ocean
Terrestrial pressure squeezing upward might explain underground rivers, but Da Vinci, to his
credit, saw a problem.
If you should say that the earths action is like that of a sponge
which when part of it is placed in water sucks up the water so
that it passes up to the top of the sponge, it cannot then pour
away any part of itself down from this top, unless it is
squeezed by something else, whereas with the summits of the
mountains one sees it is just the opposite, for there the water
always flows away of its own accord without being squeezed
by anything.

Because his works were read extensively, Jerome Cardan (1501-1576) was influential during the
latter 1500s. Although Cardan plagiarized da Vinci, he seems to have preferred Aristotle
regarding the origin of springs. The earth, like a sponge, is full of water always being squeezed
free. As the proportion of land greatly exceeded that of water, water remains on the surface only
because there is not enough room for it within.

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Chapter 10 -- Geophysical, Pneumatic and Electromagnetic Engines

Again we have a subterranean machine defying principles of
elementary physics -- whatever pressure might squeeze a
sponge would keep it squeezed -- a fact recognized by Georg
Henning Behrens in The Natural History of Hartz Forest, being a
Succinct Account of the Caverns, Lakes, Springs, Rivers, ... in
the Said Forest (1703).
[Some say] that the Earth sucks up the Water like a Sponge:
but if that were true it should also swell like a Sponge; which is
against Experience...
For a Sponge affords no moisture till 'tis squeez'd.

Capillary Action
Springs

Ocean

Water's attraction to earth is known by all who garden. Perhaps rivers flow underground because
the earth sucks it onward.
William Derham's (1657-1735) Physico-Theology (1713) declared that water rises from the level
of the sea to the tops of mountains by capillary action. We'll see more of Derham in Chapter 13,
Hydrotheology/Theohydrology, a chapter inspired by his work's title.

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La Spectacle de la Nature (1732) by Nol-Antoine Pluche (16881761) was a work of eight volumes. From it,
The seawater deposits its salt on the sands below, and that it
rises little by little, distilling through the sands, and the pores of
the earth, which have such a power of attraction as it is not
easily accounted for, and that not only sand, but other earthly
bodies have the power of attracting water, I am well assured of
from an observation which occurred to me but this vary day.
When I threw a lump of sugar into a small dish of coffee, I found
that the water immediately ascended through the sugar and lay
upon the surface of it. Yesterday I observed likewise that some
water which had been poured at the bottom of a heap of sand
ascended to the middle of it. And this case, as I take it, is
exactly the same with respect to the sea and the mountains.

A problem with the sugar-cube analogy is that landscapes are not made of sugar. The table
below indicates typical heights of capillary rise in soils.
Capillary Rise (m)
Fine Gravel

0.002

Very Coarse Sand

0.006

Coarse Sand

0.013

Medium Sand

0.025

Fine Sand

0.043

Silt

0.105

Fine Silt

0.200

Relative to the height of mountains, capillary rise is negligible.

A more fundamental mechanical problem lies in the fact that capillary action will not expel fluid
from a conduit. If it could, we'd have a perpetual motion machine, albeit a small one. Pluche
didn't check if the water ran out the top of his sugar cube and down the side.
An underground river cannot be driven by the pull of the soil.
Earthquakes
Springs

Ocean

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We can look to Thales (Chapter 2) for associations between earthquakes and springflow, but we'll
again pick up the subject in the late 1400s. Da Vincis evidence included,
That there are springs which suddenly break forth in earthquakes or other convulsions and
suddenly fail; and this happened in a mountain in Savoy where certain forests sank in and left a
very deep gap, and about four miles from here the earth opened itself like a gulf in the
mountain, and threw out a sudden and immense flood of water which scoured the whole of a
little valley of the tilled soil, vineyards and houses, and did the greatest mischief, wherever it
overflowed.
Unlike many of da Vincis hydrologic claims, he would have had personal knowledge of the Alpine
Savoy. No subterranean reservoir, there or anywhere, has ever been rent open by an
earthquake, however. Were such reservoirs to exist and were tremors to rupture them, we'd still
be pressed to explain springs that don't diminish over the long period.
Pneumatics
Springs

Ocean
The atmosphere was also thought to motivate underground rivers, the role variously taken to
come from the suction of wind, a vacuum produced by the outflow of springs, pressure on the
land surface and/or pressure from enclosed cavities.
Da Vinci considered Heron of
Alexandrias experiment in
which a burning coal is
placed in an inverted vessel
inserted below a water
surface. Water rises within
the vessel.

Da Vinci correctly attributed the phenomenon to the rarification of air within the receptacle -- as
opposed to the direct action of the heat -- and was thus willing to reject the hypothesis in which
the heat of the sun draws the water to the heights of mountains.
And if you should say as has been said that the sun sucks up and draws the waters from the
roots of the mountains to their summits, then as the heat draws the moisture to itself the heat
which is more powerful would draw to itself a greater amount of water than the less powerful.
In summer therefore during the fiery heats the springs of the waters would have to rise higher

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into the summits of the mountains than they do in winter; but we see it is the contrary seeing
that in summer the rivers lack a great part of their waters.
Because rain clouds often appear in conjunction with wind gusts, da Vinci believed that a vacuum
is formed by the condensation. Actually, it's the aerodynamic drag of falling droplets that draws
air downward. Variation of atmospheric pressure indeed explains the paths of frontal rainstorms,
but the same can't be said for the flow of liquid water.
Gregor Reisch (1467-1525) was an
intellectual of the Humanist era. His chief
work was the Margarita Philosophica
(1504), an encyclopedia of knowledge for
youthful students, the World Book of his
day.

Following is his explanation of the role of

pressure, or more specifically, negative
pressure.

Within the earth as we have shown there are many open spaces and passages, into which
(since there can be no such thing as a vacuum) vapors are drawn up from the earth and
condensed into drops of water which unite to from rills, which running down to lower levels
issue into the open air as springs.
Reisch then went on to assert that the condensation results in a new vacuum which in turn draws
up more vapor. In short, the water sucks itself up.
The plungers in the illustration from Fludd's
Philosophia Mosaica (1638) suggest a
pneumatic causation for subterranean flow,
though in this case it seems to be at global
scale.

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A variant on the vapor-bootstrap theory was put forward by
Giovanni Battista in Almagestum Novum (1651). Moisture rises
within the earth as natural vapor from seawater that has seeped
into the ground. Condensed by the cold of winter or at night, a
vacuum ensues and seawater is drawn up to fill it. Rainfall could
not provide an adequate supply for springs, as it penetrates no
more than 4 or 5 meters into the earth; and the Bible records that
springs were in existence before the first rainfall.

Kircher, never at a loss for explanations, also looked to air pressure. From his Mundus
Subterraneus (1665),
The sea, by pressure of air and wind or movement of the tide pushes the waters through
subterranean passages to the highest water chambers of the mountains.
Readers of "The Artesian Well," Western Rural and American Stockman, February 22, 1894,
were misinformed that some artesian wells are due to subterranean gasses.
The philosophy of the flow of water from artesian wells is generally known. No matter how
deep in the earth the well may have been sunk to strike a subterranean vein or pool of water,
one of two causes must operate to force a flow of water to the surface. One of these causes
[the sole correct one, we now know], and the most common, is the existence of a fountain or
source of supply situated at a higher altitude than the point of discharge at the surface of the
ground where the well is situated, and generally a long distance away. The other cause, as a
whole or in part, is the expansive force of air and gases, which operating under the column of
water to be forced to the surface, supplies the power needed to do the work which the gravity
pressure from a distance and higher fountain head has failed to do.
We'll again meet the Rev. William Derham in Chapter 13, regarding the theology of the hydrologic
cycle, but here we can inspect his physical understanding.
In Physico-Theology, or A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1713), Derham cites
a spring in his own parish which flows undiminished even when all ponds and adjoining brooks in
the country have been dry for months. The spring never increases in the rainy seasons, except
for a few hours after a violent storm. If the spring, he judges, originates from rain or vapors, there
would be change corresponding to such causes.
That springs have their origin from the sea, and not from rains and vapors, among many other
strong reasons, I conclude from the perennity of diverse springs, which always afford the same
quantity of water. Of this sort there are many to be found everywhere. But I shall, for an
instance, single out one in the Parish of Upminster, where I live, as being very proper for my
purpose, and one that I have had' better opportunities of making remarks upon above twenty
years. This in the greatest droughts is little, if at all, diminished, that l could perceive by my
eye, although the ponds all over the country, and an adjoining brook have been dry for many
months together; as particularly in dry summer months of the year 1705. And in the wettest
seasons, such as the summer and other months were, preceding the violent storm in
November 1703. I say in such wet seasons I have not observed any increment of its Stream,
excepting only for violent rains falling therein, of raining down from the higher land into it; which
discoloreth the waters oftentimes, and makes an increase of only a day's or sometimes but a

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few hours continuance. But now, if this spring had its origin from rain and vapors, there would
be an increase and decrease of the one, as there should happen to be of the other. As actually
it is in such temporary springs as have undoubtedly their source from rain and vapors.
As to the manner how the waters are raised up into the mountains and
higher lands, an easy and natural representation may be made of it by
putting a little heap of sand, ashes, or a little loaf of bread, etc., in a basin
of water where the sand will represent the dry land, or an island, and the
basin of water the sea about it. And as the water in the basin riseth to, or
near the top of the heap in it, so doth the waters of the sea, lakes, etc.
rise in the hills. Which case I take to be the same with the ascent of
liquids in capillary tubes, or between contiguous planes, or in a tube filled
with ashes: Of which the industrious and complete artificer in air-pumps,
Mr. Hauksbee, hath given us some, not contemptible experiments, in his
Phys. Mecb. Exp.

To the right, an air pump used to evacuate a glass container, from PhysicoMechanical Experiments on Various Subjects (1709) by Francis Hauksbee.
Derham eventually moves to his conclusion, albeit one not supported by his
arguments.

Among the many causes assigned for this ascent of liquors, there are two that bid the fairest for
it, viz. the pressure of the atmosphere, and the Newtonian attraction. That it is not the former,
appears from the experiments succeeding, as well, or better in vacuo, than in the open air, the
ascent being rather swifter in vacuo. This then being not the cause, I shall suppose the other
is; but for the proof thereof, I shall refer to some of our late English authors, especially some
very late experiments made before our most famous Royal Society, which will be so well
improved by some of that illustrious body, as to go near to put the matter out of doubt.
The dutiful reader, however, is left in grave doubt about what has been asserted.
Nathaniel S. Shaler's discussion of artesian wells in Outlines of the Earth's History, A Popular
Study in Physiography (1898) was a bit more complex.
It may be well to note the fact that the greater part of the so-called artesian wells, or borings
which deliver water to a height above the surface, are not true artesian sources, in that they do
not send up the water by the action of gravitation, but under the influence of gaseous
pressure... In all cases this water contains a certain amount of gases derived from the
decomposition of various substances, but principally from the alteration of iron pyrite, which
affords sulphuretted hydrogen. Thus the water is forced to the surface with considerable
energy, and the well is often named artesian, though it flows by gas pressure on the principle of
the soda-water fountain.

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Thomas Milner's The Gallery of Nature, A Pictorial and Descriptive Tour
Through Creation, Illustration of the Wonders of Astronomy, Physical
Geography, and Geology (1882) provides some pneumatic speculation.
Weeding Well, in the Peak of Derbyshire, otherwise called the Ebbing
and Flowing ... lies in a field by the road-side in the neighborhood of
Castleton Dale, surrounded with mud and weeds. The motion of the
water depends upon the quantity of rain during the season, and is by no
means regular, as it has ceased to flow for several weeks during a
drought; but, in very wet weather, it will flow and ebb more than once in
an hour. The time which it continues to flow varies; but it is sometimes
four or five minutes, the water appearing at first slightly agitated, and then
issuing forth from nine small apertures with a gurgling sound. After
remaining stationary, it then ebbs to its ordinary level... No theory has yet
been proposed to account for the peculiarity of these springs which is
perfectly satisfactory; but probably the interposition of columns of gas
conveying pressure, somewhat on the principle of Hero's fountain, acts
an important part, as well as the common hypothesis of an interior cavity
of water discharging itself by a siphon-formed channel.
A pneumatic engine for underground rivers requires a disparity in air pressure to push or suck
water uphill. And indeed the atmospheric pressure at the foot of a hill is greater than that at the
top, but the difference in energy (what would propel the fluid) is nil because the pressure drop is
balanced by the elevation gain.
And 25 years later, the pneumatic theory with two options: one due to atmospheric pressure
differential and the other to vapor entrainment. From "Blowing Springs and Wells of Georgia, with
an Explanation of the Phenomena," Science, February 8, 1907, by S.W. McCallie,
Grant Blowing Spring
The phenomenon can readily be detected by holding a smoldering match or lighted paper near
the opening from which the water flows. The motion of the air is to be seen in its full force at an
opening in the bluff above... At this opening, which leads down to the stream supplying the
spring, there is, at times, a strong current of air passing inward or outward, depending on the
atmospheric conditions hereafter to be discussed.
Boston Well
The Boston deep well belongs to the second class of blowing wells, namely, wells in which the
direction of the air current is in one direction only.
The main water supply at present is said to come from a subterranean stream in the limestone
at 120 feet... Shortly after the completion of the well, Mr. J.Z. Brantley, the mayor of the town,
discovered that there was a continuous draught of air passing down the casing, and by placing
his ear near the mouth of the well he was able to detect a sound like running water. This
indraught, Mr. Brantley reports, was quite strong and continued as long as the well was left
open.
The Lester Well
Mr. Miller, in describing this well, says that at a depth of 154 feet he struck a stream of water
running so swiftly that he could not pass a two-pound iron plumb bob attached to a fishing line
through it. He reports blowing crevices in the well at 87, 124 and 144 feet. When the well was
being bored the air from each of these cavities is said to have passed in in the forenoon and
out in the afternoon; but after the completion of the well to the swift moving subterranean
stream, the air ceased to pass outward, but was sucked in with a strong steady pull, drawing
the flame and smoke of a torch down the casing when held 6 inches above its opening.

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Causes of Blowing Springs and Wells.
The two classes of blowing springs and wells above described appear to be due to two entirely
different causes. Those of the first class, of which the Grant Blowing Spring is a good type,
seem to be due entirely to the difference of atmospheric pressure of the air on the outside and
on the inside of the cave.
It's the pneumatic subterranean engine, the earth's interior air pressure blowing out the water.
In the second class of wells and springs, the constantly outgoing or the constantly ingoing
current is entirely independent of atmospheric conditions. The currents, whether outward or
inward, act with equal energy during high or low barometer and always move in the same
direction. The Boston and the Lester deep wells are excellent examples of wells and springs of
this class. The phenomenon which they exhibit seems to be due entirely to the friction of the
air on a rapidly moving current of water. This phenomenon is beautifully illustrated in Richard's
water air-blast, to be found in many well-equipped chemical laboratories. In the Boston well,
and also in the Lester well, appear almost exactly the same conditions met with in Richard's
water air blast. The well itself forms the inlet for the air, and the rapidly flowing stream in the
subterranean channel below completes the conditions necessary for an ingoing air blast... It
naturally follows that it must escape at some other point as an outgoing current, thus giving rise
to continuously blowing caves or springs. As underground streams frequently pass from one
bed of rock to another in their subterranean course, they, no doubt, often form waterfalls which
possess all the essential conditions necessary for producing an air blast, thus giving rise to
continuously blowing caves and springs.
The two classes of blowing wells and springs

Low
Pressure
High
Pressure

Air Flow

McCallie provided additional explanation in A Preliminary Report on the Underground Waters of

Georgia (1908).
It will be seen by the description of the Quitman deep well that not all deep wells penetrating
subterranean channels with swift flowing streams are blowing or sucking wells. This may be
accounted for by the channel being only partially filled with water, and the air being able to
circulate freely within. The essential condition of continuous suction in wells is that the air once
dragged into the underground stream by the friction of the water cannot again reach the point of
intake.
The current of air above noted at the entrance of the cavers at Forest Falls is also due to the
friction of the air and water, but as the air is free to escape into a subterranean chamber and
the accompanying air could not escape by the way of its entrance it would give rise to a strong
blast. As underground streams frequently pass from one bed of rock to another in their
subterranean course, they no doubt often form waterfalls which possess all of the essential
conditions necessary for producing air an blast and thus give rise to continuously flowing caves
or springs,

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McCallie's pneumatic theory wasn't confined to scientific publication, as evidenced in the Bend
[Oregon] Bulletin, March 30, 1906
Drafts over deep wells are usually due to changes of temperature or barometric pressure, air
being forced in as the pressure rises and drawn out when the barometer is falling. But in tow
wells in the Vicksburg Jackson limestone of southern Georgia have shown the strange
phenomenon of a continuous in-draft. This has been investigated by S.W. McCallie, who has
found a rapid subterranean stream at a depth of about 120 feet, and it is supposed that the air
is sucked in by friction and carried along until the water rises as a large spring.
McCallie's logic is circular, of course, the water dragging the air and the air powering the water,
but then again, understandings that seem logical to us may well be dismantled in the century to
come.
Richard's apparatus made use of the injector principal to
supply relatively small volumes of compressed air at low
pressure. A small jet of water projected through a tube of
gradually increasing diameter sweeps a larger volume of air
into a receiver where the two are separated. Efficiency is
increased by a projecting step in the injector tube, or by
giving the tube the form or an undulating curve, deflecting
the jet to completely fill the passage.

Blast

Vacuum

Filter
Pump

Illustration from Laboratory Supplies and

Chemicals for Chemists and Bacteriologists (1919),
A. Daigger & Company

Although we now know that air pressure does not drive spring flow, we can appreciate that it once
seemed possible. Caves breathe in and out as high and low pressure weather systems move
over a caves entrance. Air exchange at speeds as high as 130 kilometers/hour have been
measured.
Electromagnetism

Springs

Ocean
We'll pursue the modern understanding of geomagnetism in Chapter 48, but here we can note
what's been widely understood for centuries, that our globe has magnetic properties.

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A relationship -- or lack thereof, we may come to conclude -- between underground rivers and
electromagnetism might be manifested in one of three manners.
As an electromagnetic field emitted by subterranean waters revealing the water's presence, a
hypothesis we'll consider in Chapter 49, Finding the Underground Waters.
As an electromagnetic field emitted by subterranean waters altering our terrestrial environment,
allegations we'll weigh in Chapter 96, The Paranormal.
As an electromagnetic engine for the propulsion of subterranean water. With discovery of a
relationship between magnetism and electricity -- what we now know to be an electromagnetic
field -- it is not surprising that early investigators hoped that this new science might resolve
geophysical perplexities, how water seemed to rise to mountain tops, for example.

De Magnete (1600) by William Gilbert (15441603). In the first work to describe the earth's
magnetic field, oceanic tides stem from
magnetic interaction between earth and moon.

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"Magntisme et hydromantie" from Kircher's

Magnes Sive de Arte Magnetica Opus
Tripartitum (1643) which considered the
magnetism of the earth and heavenly bodies,
the tides and the metaphorical position of
God, the central magnet of the universe.

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Presented in the Epitome of Copernican Astronomy
(1618-1621), the natural philosophy of Johannes Kepler
(1571-1630) -- whom we noted in Chapter 8 for his
chemical speculations -- added a solar magnet to Gilberts
electrical universe.
The conclusion is therefore plausible: because the
Earth moves the Moon by its species, and is a magnetic
body; and because the sun moves the planets in a
similar manner by the species which it emits, therefore
the Sun, too, is a magnetic body.
Kepler was in fact close to the modern idea of gravity.
If the moon and earth were not retained in their
respective orbits by an animal force or by some
equivalent force, the earth would climb toward the moon
and the moon would descend toward the earth until
these two heavenly bodies were joined. If the earth
ceased attracting the waters covering it, the sea waves
would all rise and flow toward the body of the moon.

While earth science soon abandoned a magnetically-driven hydrologic cycle, the possibility of
magnetically-assisted water flow is yet discussed.
Laplace's Law describes the interaction between a magnetic field and an electric current when
they are applied at right angles to each other and to a conductor of electricity. When an electrical
current is passed through the conductor, an electromagnetic force known as a Lorentz force
pushes the conductor in a direction perpendicular to the conductor and the magnetic field. The
magnitude of the force is proportional to the magnetic field strength and the current density.
We will consider four schemes for an electromagnetic engine suitable for elevating a fluid.

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Method 1. Liquid Metal Pump
An electromagnetic pump moves liquid metal
through a pipe between the poles of an
electromagnet by passing a current through
the liquid metal. To the tight is the conceptual
design: a C-shaped permanent magnet, a pipe
carrying molten metal as the conductor, and a
direct current applied by an external source
such as a battery.

Such a device can propel liquid metals, but not

water?

Method 2. Water Pump

The Encyclopedia of Free Energy, a perpetualmotion reference, hypothesizes a like-comprised
electromagnetic pump in which "there is no moving
core except the motion of the liquid salty water,"
failing to recognize that the "liquid salty water"
must be magnetized, a quality not within water's
capacity because its dipolarity is electrical, not
magnetic.
Water's polarity is due to the higher nuclear charge
of oxygen displacing the shared bonding electrons
towards the nucleus, leaving the oxygen with a
partial negative charge and the hydrogen with a
partial positive charge.
For a molecule to become magnetized, it must not only contain an unpaired electron, but also
must group with like-aligned molecule into local domains that amplify the effect and retain their
orientation over time. The effect is known as "ferromagnetism," the most well-known example, of
course, being metallic iron.
To the Encyclopedia of Free Energy's credit, there is the disclaimer attached to its plans involving
PVC pipe and a windshield wiper motor: "Please remember this only an Experimental Idea."
Electrical dipolarity gives water the ability dissolve, at least in small part, most geospheric
inorganic solids, making water the "universal solvent," a quality of consequence in Chapter 40,
Karstology.

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Method 3. Levitation
Being electrically dipolar, a stream of water can be directed by
an electromagnetic field, the static electricity a hair comb
providing an easy experiment.
A water molecule can in fact be levitated by an
electromagnetic field roughly 300 times that of the earth's,
doable with electromagnets, but not with permanent magnets.
No one has pulled water up a well tube or even above a lab
table.

Method 4. Reciprocating Pump

Another, and very different, electromagnetic pump concept
employs two rotating magnets in an annular channel,
simultaneous energized with opposing polarity by of a pair of
solenoids. One magnet works as a pump while the other is
between the inlet and the outlet ports, acting as a valve. With
each cycle, the magnets reverse their function. Tests have
yielded a flow rate of 13.7 milliliters/minute at 200 rpm at a
pressure of 785 Pascals, something less than 1 percent of
atmospheric pressure.
This pump is thus just a mechanical pump in which magnetic
switches control the component function.
Method 1 can work, but not for water.
Method 2 does not work.
Method 3 can work, but not at hydrologic scale.
Method 4 is a novel rotational pump utilizing electrical, rather than mechanical, switches.
While the concept of an electromagnetic engine for subterranean streamflow resonates with
some aspects of modern geoscience and technology, it's a proposition that again and again fails
upon further consideration.
In 1940, M. King Hubbert's The Theory of Ground Water Motion demonstrated that Darcys
equation for groundwater (Chapter 45) is analogous to Ohms law for electric current. By no
means, however, does this imply that subsurface water is driven by electricity, but rather that the
mathematical form of the underlying equations are the same. Because things act the same is not
to say that they are the same.
We'll turn to literary fiction in chapters ahead, but the setting of John Mastin's The Immortal Light,
a Scientific Romance (1907), an underground world in which electrical charge is the driver of
nature, provides a fitting departure for our consideration of electromagnetism as a hydrologic
energizer.

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The air seemed to come along with several swiftly-flowing
underground streams which roared and swelled in
cataracts of foam... All this part was palisaded round, and
well for us it was so protected, as the effect of the
seething mass of foam-covered water had a curious,
hypnotic effect on us, as it ran eddying in countless
circles, all running to the outlet.
Some distance farther on it was even more inviting, for the
cotton wool became detached into little pillows which
twisted and twirled in a most fascinating manner. These
passed on so slowly that we could easily keep pace with
them as we walked along the bank, and then, suddenly
they shot like lightning over the mass of smooth, oilylooking water, and in a second, were split up again into a
dust of foam.
Underground river map
Our intrepid explorers, not evolved for their battery-like environment, must be wary of becoming
short circuits.
"How do you account for the fact that this water is not magnetic?" asked Belt, after putting in his
hands and feeling no shock. "Water is such an excellent conductor that it should carry the
current from the other side of the wall. See, it flows from the inside."
"So it would," replied Norris, "if it came here through an archway, or grating j but it seems to
soak through the wall like water through carbon in a filter, thus the wall perhaps also insulates
the water and makes it safe."
This seemed to be the only explanation possible.
Conclusion
This and the previous two chapters suggest a myriad of engines thought possible to elevate
subterranean rivers. Da Vinci hypothesized many such mechanisms, Kircher provided striking
graphics and any number of early scientists proposed theoretical bases for such hydrologic
pathways. As we will pursue in chapters to come, such speculation even today enlivens popular
fantasy.

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Chapter 11 -- Straining the Salt

CHAPTER 11
STRAINING THE SALT
As to the source of the sea's salinity, the early philosophers were accord -- the sea is the "sweat
of the earth." In this, they were correct.
As to the freshness of streamflow, the thinkers were likewise in agreement -- the earth filters
away the salt. It this, they were wrong.
Springs

Ocean

Why is the Sea Salty?

The Greeks of Chapter 2 were familiar with two processes thought to remove salt from water.
Evaporation, solar or by fire, could be seen to leave salt crystals behind.
Filtration through a cloth or fine-grained media could likewise be seen to leave residue. That
the residue was coarse particulates, not salt grains, wasn't taken to be significant.
We know today that dissolved salts are filterable only by energy-consumptive reverse osmosis, a
technology of recent decades and requiring human operation. While we're no more intelligent
than the Greeks, we've the advantage of textbooks in physical chemistry.
Anaximander (611-547 BC) believed that all the earth was initially surrounded with moisture
which dried into seas, which too, would ultimately expire.
To explain freshwater springs, Heraclitus (540-475 BC) cited distillation and filtration in the
atmospheric and subterrestrial routes, respectively.
Anaxagoras (500-428 BC) attributed the sea's salinity to what the water gathers as it runs over
the earth, akin to how water strained through ashes becoming salty. The sea is the accumulation
of such runoff. To this point, the Greek is entirely correct, but now his thinking becomes muddled.
Assuming only a subterranean hydrologic cycle, the seas salinity is augmented by its
underground descent in which it garners a portion of the matrix through which it passes.
Evaporation concentrates the substrate, expelling the supernatant.
Empedocles (490-430 BC), a founder of the cosmogenic theory of the four classical elements, left
us a poetic definition of seawater as "the sweat of the earth." It says it all.

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Democritus (460-370 BC) held that the salinity of the sea is due to the same cause as the
accumulation of salt on the land, like seeking like. As the water flees via secret channels to lakes
and rivers, the sea will become smaller and smaller and finally dry up.
Aristotle (384-322 BC) drew upon them all.
At first the Earth was surrounded by moisture. Then the sun began to dry it up, part of it
evaporated, and is the cause of winds while the remainder formed the seas. So the seas are
being dried up. Others say that the sea is a kind of sweat exuded by the earth when the sun
heats it, and that this explains its saltness, for all sweat is salt. Others say that the saltness is
due to the earth. Just as water strained through ashes becomes salt, so the sea owes its
saltness to the mixture of earth with similar properties.
The fresh water, then, is evaporated, the salt water left. The process is analogous to the
digestion of liquid food. The place occupied by the sea is the natural place of water, and fresh
water evaporates more easily and quickly when it reaches and is dispersed in the sea. The sea
is not salt either because it is a residue left by evaporation or because of an admixture of earth;
nor is it any explanation to call it the sweat of the earth.
Concluding "nor is it any explanation to call it the sweat of the earth" seems odd from a
biologically-inclined philosopher, but to Aristotle's credit, his was the first theory of salt circulation
not reliant on subsurface filtration.
Seneca (3 BC-65 AD) agreed with the early Greeks that marine substances separate. Requoting from Chapter 3,
The sea water returns by a secret path, and is filtered in its passage back. Being dashed
about as it passes through the endless, winding channels in the ground, it loses its salinity,
and, purged of its bitterness in such a variety of ground as it passes through, it eventually
changes into pure, fresh water.
Unlike his predecessors, however, Seneca was on the lookout for evidence. "The endless,
winding channels in the ground" he believed to be proven by calcareous tuff.
The poet Lucretius Caro (99-55 BC) adopted Aristotelian
explanations in De Rerum Natura. Mt. Etna, Lucretius
suggested, is hollow. As for the source of springs,
The sun drinks some, to quench his natural heat;
And some the winds brush of.
Some passes through the earth, diffused all over,
And leaves its salt behind in every pore;
For all returns through narrow channels freed
And joins where ere fountain shows her head
And thence fine streams in fair meadows play.

The clouds imbibe much seawater, as some translations render the leading words. The power
of wind drives together an abundance of clouds and presses the water out.
"And leaves its salt behind in every pore" was an insightful consequence for a Roman poet, but
one not to be carried to logical conclusion until much later.

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Chapter 11 -- Straining the Salt

Less astutely, Lucretius noted,
Since the earth has a porous body, and it is joined together with the sea, girdling its shores all
around, it is necessary that as the flow of water comes from the land into the sea, so also it
should ooze into the land from the salt sea; for the pungency is strained off, and the substance
of the water oozes back, and all meets in a moving mass of sweet along the path which was
once been cut for it in its liquid course.
The science is Roman -- to put it positively -- but as "ooze into the land" is poetic, we'll grant a
schematic of squeezed mud.
Springs

Ocean
Fifteen centuries later, even Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), whom we met in Chapter 8, never
shy with answers, was perplexed by the oceans. According to Bishop Richard Watson's
Chemical Essays (1781-1787),
Father Kircher, after having consulted three and thirty authors upon the subject, could not help
remarking, that the fluctuations of the ocean itself were scarcely more various then opinions of
men concerning the origin of its saline impregnation.
But Why, Then, are Springs Not?
We need only consult Aristotle.
As fresh water is lighter than saltwater, the former properly seeks its natural place above the
latter by rising, though the philosopher himself wouldn't have defined "lightness" in terms of
physical measurement. That dissolved salt doesn't settle within the liquid, leaving a fresh upper
stratum, was pragmatically recognized by the Greeks, but Aristotle and his followers wouldn't
have conditioned the voracity of philosophical truth on fallible physical verification. Fresh seeking
fresh and salt seeking salt, the philosopher would have determined.
The practicality of subterranean salt separation aside, any desalination scheme poses a
consequent question. What becomes of the residue?
In the short run, we might expect the formation of salt beds, a geological formation familiar to the
ancients. In the long run, however, there's only so much subterranean space to store the
byproduct.
In his Notebook entry "Refutation of the Pliny's Theory of the Saltness of the Sea," da Vinci
(1452-1519) ponders Pliny. We'll break da Vinci's thoughts into proposition and refutation.

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Pliny says that the water of the sea is salt

because the heat of the sun dries up the
moisture and drinks it up; and this gives to the
wide stretching sea the savor of salt.

But this cannot be admitted, because if the

saltness of the sea were caused by the heat
of the sun, there can be no doubt that lakes,
pools and marshes would be so much the
more salt, as their waters have less motion
and are of less depth; but experience shows
us, on the contrary, that these lakes have
their waters quite free from salt.

Again it is stated by Pliny that this saltness

might originate, because all the sweet and
subtle portions which the heat attracts easily
being taken away, the more bitter and coarser
part will remain, and thus the water on the
surface is fresher than at the bottom.

But this is contradicted by the same reason

given above.

Again, it has been said that the saltness of the

sea is the sweat of the earth.

To this it may be answered that all the

springs of water which penetrate through the
earth, would then be salt.

But the conclusion is, that the saltness of the

sea must proceed from the many springs of
water which, as they penetrate into the earth,
find mines of salt and these they dissolve in
part, and carry with them to the ocean and the
other seas, whence the clouds, the begetters of
rivers, never carry it up

And the sea would be saltier in our times

than ever it was at any time.

And if the adversary were to say that in infinite

time the sea would dry up or congeal into salt,

To this I answer that this salt is restored to

the earth by the setting free of that part of
the earth which rises out of the sea with the
salt it has acquired, and the rivers return it to
the earth under the sea.

We tend to know da Vinci for his intuition, not his formal logic, but here he lays bare the
consequential fallacy of two millennia of natural philosophy. The earth beneath us has not over
the eons become an accumulation of salt.
Geological action lifts up the salty sea bed and rivers, both above and below ground, return it to
the sea. But as was his journaling propensity, da Vinci rarely halted when he was ahead.
The ocean does not penetrate under the earth, and this we learn from the many and various
springs of fresh water which, in many parts of the ocean make their way up from the bottom to
the surface. The same thing is farther proved by wells dug beyond the distance of a mile from
the said ocean, which fill with fresh water; and this happens because the fresh water is lighter
than salt water and consequently more penetrating.
That fresh water penetrates more against salt water, than salt water against fresh is proved by
a thin cloth dry and old, hanging with the two opposite ends equally low in the two different
waters, the surfaces of which are at an equal level; and it will then be seen how much higher
the fresh water will rise in this piece of linen than the salt; by so much is the fresh lighter than
the salt.
Fresh water does indeed float above saline water (a Ghyben-Herzberg lens to hydrogeologists),
but it's due to a difference in density, not as a result of being "more penetrating." The fresh
water's not lifted; it's seepage from above.

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Chapter 11 -- Straining the Salt

Da Vinci's reference to linen would seem to imply capillarity, but in that respect, fresh and
saltwater are indistinguishable.
"The ocean does not penetrate under the earth" substantially contradicts da Vinci's writings of
Chapters 7 and 8 in support of underground rivers. While da Vinci's critique of Pliny is sound, his
own thoughts meandered.
Da Vinci's contempory, Felix Faber (1441-1502) drew attention to the connection between water
sinking in mountain dolines and springs in the valleys below. From Faber's Historiae Suevorum
(1489),
Therefore Nature has ready in the earth certain hollows in which the waters collect and... from
whence they flow further through veins to the place where they have to flow out. These are
especially noticeable in the Swabian AIps, where one sees many cup-shaped pits in the
ground, into which the rain and the snow water penetrate and sink into underground lakes from
whence it gushes forth again.
At the same time, however, he thought some springs also fed with desalinated sea water.
Incapable of bearing the severity of the sea, it [spring water] comes concealed in the veins of
the earth and penetrates in inexplorable routes into the narrowest crevices of the earth and
rock, so that it leaves behind it the bitter skin with which it was clad in the sea, behind on the
sand, the rocks and the earth. And thus it eventually comes again to the place, from whence it
started, and emerges sweet, clear and drinkable out of the earth, to flow again according to the
word of the Preacher [i.e., Ecclesiastes].
Meteorologicum (1627) by S.L. Fromondus dealt with springs, rivers, the sea and earthquakes.
Seawater is evaporated by the earth's central fire, the salt coming off with "the steam and only
being separated from it as it filters up through the earth."
Descartes expressed similar views in his Philosophidae Principia (1644), but being more widely
read, hence had greater influence. The earth's heat causes steam to rise continuously from large
seawater-filled cavities beneath the mountains, passing through crevices so minute that when the
steam condenses against the cooler rocks, the condensate cannot return by the same route and
therefore seeks larger fissures leading springs on the earth's surface. The salt left behind
explains the deposits of rock salt.
Mathematician Jacques Pelletier (1517-1582) supposed that springs must be of marine origin, as
many of them contain salt. While saline springs do exist, they're in fact uncommon, and thus
here we have a logical determination based on false premise.

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According to Kircher, the earth
contains subterranean conduits
from deposits of Ferrum,
Sulphur, Aqua dulcis, Sal,
Nitrum, Alumen and Vitriolum, all
but the last easily cognated.
Vitriolum is glass.
Pelletier overestimated the
extent of saline springs and
Kircher was far too fond of
subterranean rivers, but the two
scientists were on the chemical
track. Mineral content indeed
reveals the nature of a spring's
source.

"Must Clog and Obstruct"

But let us return to Lucretius' earlier deduction that any ocean-derived subsurface stream that
emerges as fresh water "leaves its salt behind in every pore."
Charles Hutton, whom we'll again encounter in Chapter 12, Superterranean Metrics, raised an
irrefutable challenge in A Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary, Containing an Explanation
of the Terms, and an Account of the Several Subjects (1795).
And though the sand and earth through which the water ascends may acquire some saline
particles from it, they are nevertheless incapable of rendering it so fresh as the water of our
fountains is generally found to be. Not to add, that in process of time the saline particles of
which the water is deprived, either by subterranean distillation or filtration, must clog and
obstruct those canals and alembics.
Natural desalination can't persist if the salt is left to smother the mechanism. Were underground
rivers to work this way, the earth beneath our feet would by now be packed with white crystals.
Had the likes of Pelletier and Kircher pondered the implications of "clog and obstruct," their belief
underground rivers might have been less certain. But as often the case through history, models
rooted in culture are slow to fade.
Thomas Milner (Chapter 10) illustrated that even another century was not suffice for the demise
of an illogical concept.
It is possibly the case, indeed, that the ocean filtering through pores of the earth the salt
particles being lost in the passage may give rise to many springs; but as the preceding cause is
amply sufficient to explain their formation, we need not recur to any other.
As with all the candidate mechanisms of Chapter 8-8.2, salinity comes up short as the engine for
underground streamflow.
Naturalists must have come to wonder why their otherwise-so-productive scientific method again
and again failed to discover the mechanism for desalinating underground rivers. Perhaps -- we
can imagine them at this point lowering their voices as to not invite the scorn of their colleagues -the cause is absent because such rivers are not in existence.
We'll return to the subject of salt in Chapter 72, Minewaters.

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Chapter 12 -- Superterranean Metrics

CHAPTER 12
SUPERTERRANEAN METRICS
With Aristotle's help, Greek mythology sustained popular belief in underground rivers for
millennia. Christianity then assumed the conceptual stewardship of underground rivers as the will
of God. With Renaissance probing for sensible reason came a spectrum of candidate causalities
for subsurface streams. Does the water rise because of a fiery earth? Tidal action? Chapters 810 provided more explanations than perhaps we can remember.
While scholasticism had moved beyond Plato to embrace observation, the Renaissance, per se,
provided few tools by which to test the best explanations. Da Vinci wrote prolifically and drew
exquisitely, but didn't bother with measurement.
Until the era of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), five erroneous hydrological propositions were yet
favored by most natural philosophers.
Mechanisms such as wind, capillary action wave or action can draw large quantities of water
from the earths interior.
Sea water can lose its salt by infiltrating through soil.
Rainfall is insufficient to account for all water discharged by rivers.
Rainfall cannot infiltrate into the ground in large quantities.
The earth contains a large network of caverns and rivers.
But combining Platonic credence in mathematics with an Aristotelian influx of physical evidence,
hydrology was about to change.
The discernment process began to advance when chemist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) established
the standard of experimental inquiry that's still with us: tests must be conducted under controlled
conditions and observations must be replicable.
As illustrated by the three paintings below, metrics became valued.

God as Architect, from the Bible

Moralise, Codex Vindobonensis
(c. 1250)

William Blake, God as an

Architect (1794)

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Chapter 12 -- Superterranean Metrics

In the leftmost piece, a product of the Middle Ages, God is measuring his creation, the units
perhaps being metrics of holiness. In the next painting, 500 years later, God again reaches
downward, but this time to measure the tangible. In the third, fueling the science vs. religion
controversies to come, God is replaced by Newton.
Newtons Principia (1687) was elegant as it pertained to celestial workings, but provided little but
a few conceptual pointers regarding much of what occurs below. The path of Mars made more
mathematical sense than did the level of the Thames.
A 1692 issue of The Gentlemans Journal listed ten different explanations of the oceanic tides,
complaining that competing ideas caused the learned ... [to be] much puzzled about... the Flux
and Reflux of the Sea.
The task of quantifying subsurface flow was indeed the most challenging part of the hydrologic
cycle. Rainfall could be measured with a pan. Streamflow would be estimated by measuring a
cross-section and timing a floating object. But no one could reach into the earth with a pan, a
ruler, a clock, or for that matter, any instrument of measurement.
As we remarked in concluding Chapter 2, we'd like someone underground to take a look, but if
we can't send someone with a lantern, perhaps we can measure what's occurring on the earth's
surface and deduce the rest.
This chapter explores how measurement disproved the hydrologic necessity of underground
rivers.
We'll begin by looking three Frenchmen,
Bernard Palissy,
Pierre Perrault,
Edm Mariotte,
and then cross the channel to note the contributions of three Englishmen,
Edmond Halley,
Charles Hutton,
John Dalton.
Three Frenchmen
French Huguenot Bernard Palissy (1509-1590) began
his career making stained glass windows and after 16
years of experimentation, perfected an enameled
pottery which brought him and his heirs great fortune.
An 1880 Palissy factory gravy dish is shown to the left.

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Chapter 12 -- Superterranean Metrics

Among the first of his nation to embrace Protestantism, had
it not been for his patron the High Constable of Saintes,
Palissy would have been executed.
But Palissy was more than a successful potter and free
thinker. He was a natural philosopher, his theories
generally based upon personal observation. Because
Palissy was familiar with Vitruvius (Chapter 3), it's likely that
the Frenchman lifted ideas from the Roman, but even so,
Palissys substantiation was by contemporary observation
carried out with contemporary logic,

In his Discours Admirables de la Nature des Eaux Etfonteines (1580, but not translated to English
until 1876) Palissy makes use of two voices: Theory, the one who imagines, and Practice, the
writers alter ego, the one who looks.
Theory challenges:
Looking back upon the whole body of doctrine taught by the old Potter in the last years of his
life, where have you found all this written? Or tell me in what school you have been?
And Practice responds:
I have no other book than the heavens and the earth, which are known of all men, and given to
all men to be known and read. Having read in the same I have reflected on terrestrial matters.
Practice unsuccessfully seeks water from a village spring:
When for a long time I had closely considered the cause of the source of natural fountains and
the places where they might proceed, at length I became plainly assured that they could
proceed from or be engendered by nothing but the rains.
Theory finds fault:
After having heard your opinion, I am compelled to say that you are a great fool. Do you think
me so ignorant that I should put more faith in what you say than in so large a number of
philosophers who tell us that all waters come from the sea and return thither? There are none
even to the old men who do not hold this language, and from time on we have all believed it. It
is a great presumption in you to wish to make us believe a doctrine altogether new, as if you
were the cleverest philosopher.
Practice:
If I were not well assured in my opinion, you would put me to great shame, but I am not alarmed
at your abuse or your fine language, for I am quite certain that I shall win against you and
against all those who are of your opinion, though they may be Aristotle and the best
philosophers that ever lived, for I am quite assured that my opinion is trustworthy.

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Theory:
Verily I find out now that you are a great liar, and if it were true that seawater could be so raised
up into the air and fall afterwards upon the earth, it would be salt rain, so there you are caught
by your own argument.
Practice contends that rivers and springs have no source other than rainfall, for which he is called
a great dolt by Theory for contradicting the most excellent philosophers.
Practice refutes that streams must originate either from seawater or from air converted into water.
The concept of gravity weighs against the seawater theory, as sea level would have to exceed
the mountain tops.
I tell you, as a general and certain rule, that waters never rise higher than the sources from
which they proceed.
Spring waters would be saline and would dry up during low tide. Some rivers do dry up, of
course, but,
If the sea were to feed by its nipples all the springs of the universe, they would never dry up
during the months of July, August and September, at which time an infinite number of wells dry
up.
And as maximum tidal levels are associated with the full moons of March and July, wells and
rivers should not go dry during those months.
Even if the sea were as high as the mountains,
Its waters would not reach the high parts of these mountains where the springs originate. This
is because the earth is, in many places, full of holes, cracks and abysses a through which water
that came from the sea would flow back to the plain from the first holes, sources or abysses it
could find.
Practice concedes that water could form in caverns by the condensation of vapor, but in
inadequate amount to sustain rivers. Rather,
Rain water that falls in the winter goes up in summer, to come again in winter... And when the
winds push these vapors the waters fall on all parts of the land, and when it pleases God that
these clouds (which are nothing more than a mass of water) should dissolve, these vapors are
turned to into rain that falls on the ground.
Moreover,
[Soils] retain water from the rain as would a bronze vessel. And the said water falling on these
mountains flows downwards through the soil and cracks and continues until it finds a uniform
and hard bed of stone or solid rock; and when it comes to rest on such a base and finds a canal
or other opening, it emerges as springs, or as streams and rivers, depending on the size of the
openings.
Practice has qualitatively described porous-media groundwater flow as we today understand it.
Significant to our pursuit of underground rivers, while Theory clings to idealized subterranean
channels, Practice demands a mechanism consistent with how water is observed to seep.
As Palissy concluded (in his own voice),
When I had long and closely examined the source of the springs of natural fountains, and the
place whence they could come, I finally understood that they could not come from or be
produced by anything but rains.

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Chapter 12 -- Superterranean Metrics

Pierre Perrault (1608-1680), Receiver General of Finances in
Paris, studied the River Seine near Burgundy, measuring the
average annual rainfall over a small portion of the upper basin for
comparison to the annual discharge from that catchment.
The portrait to the right is of Perrault, but as we'll shortly note, we
can't be certain that we have the correct sibling.

Perrault's De lOrigine des Fontaines (1674) reported that rainfall was six times the amount that
flowed out of the watershed, thus proving that precipitation was more than enough to supply the
water in the Seine and,

Frontispiece, "De L'origine des Fontaines"

To cause this River to flow for one year, from its source to the place designated, and which
must serve also to supply all of the losses, such as the feeding of trees, plants, grasses,
evaporation
If then this water suffices for one river, it will suffice for all the other rivers of the world in
proportion.
Perrault demonstrated by measurement that capillary rise of water was less than 1 meter in sand
and could not create a body of free water above the water table. The revolutionary aspect of
Perraults finding of a 6:1 rainfall/runoff ratio was that the value substantially exceeds unity.
Palissy had suggested that rainfall was sufficient to supply the total streamflow, but it took 94
years for Perrault to attach a number.
Pierre's brother Claude (1613-1688) was a physician, but became the architect of the Louvre and
translated of the ten books of Vitruvius (Chapter 3).

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We'll catch up with brother, Charles (1628-1703), in Chapter 18, Underground Rivers in
Continental Fiction for his contribution to the study of underground streams in Tales of Mother
Goose (1697).
Edm Mariotte (1620-1684) refuted the yet-popular assumption of
springs derived from condensation in subterranean caverns, as
precipitation could not penetrate more than a few meters into the
earth.

Mariotte's Trait du Mouvement des Eaux et des Autres Corps Fluides

(1686),
For if ABC is a vault in the mountain DEF; it is evident,
that if the vapor should become water in the concave of
the surface ABC, that water would fall perpendicularly
towards HGI, and not towards T or M, and consequently
would never make a spring. Besides, it is denied that
there are many such hollow places in mountains, and it
can't be made appear that there are such. If we say
there is earth on the side of, and beneath ABC, it will be
answered, that the vapor will gush out at the sides
towards A and C, and that very little will become water;
and because it appears that there is almost always clay
where there are springs, it is very likely that those
supposed distilled waters can't pass through, and
consequently that springs can't be produced by that
means.
More simply: We won't find subterranean reservoirs behind springs.
To establish that the source of groundwater must be precipitation, Mariotte compared seepage
into the cellar of the Paris Observatory to the rainfall above, noting that more water came into the
basement after heavy rains.
[Rainfall} filtered through the soil until it met with impervious layers in then interior, through
which it was unable to pass; it therefore continued its course along them in an oblique direction
until it found egress and came out as springs.
Scientifically better educated that Perrault, Mariotte sought to confirm Perraults result using a
much larger catchment, that of the Seine at Paris.
It is thus evident that when a third of the rain waters have evaporated, a third will keep the soil
moist in the large plains, and a third will still be sufficient to feed springs and rivers.
As Perraults and Mariottes studies were close in both time and location, it is informative to
compare their findings.

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The table below summarizes their respective results.

Investigator

Perrault

Mariotte

Publication

De Lorigine des Fontaines

(1674)

Trait du Mouvement des Eaux

et des Autres Corps Fluides
(1685)

Basin

Seine above Aignay-le-Duc

Seine above Paris

Area (square km)

121

60,356

Duration of Study

3 years

520

400

Annual Precipitation (cubic m)

60,750,000

24,142,400,000

Annual runoff (cubic m)

10,000,000

3,553,056,000

6.0:1

6.8:1

Average Precipitation (mm)

Precipitation/Runoff

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An historical fact, Claude Perrault was the architect
of Versailles and Mariotte, the well-driller. The
history of scientific hydrology is indeed one of
crossed paths.

Water Tank, Versailles

Current estimates of the precipitation/runoff ratio are summarized below by continents.
Precipitation
(mm)

Evapotranspiration (mm)

Runoff
(mm)

Precipitation/
Runoff

Africa

690

550

140

4.9:1

Asia

720

430

290

2.5:1

Australia

740

510

230

3.2:1

Europe

730

410

320

2.3:1

North America

670

380

290

2.3:1

South America

1650

1060

590

2.8:1

Perrault's and Mariotte's fundamental breakthrough wasn't the precise precipitation/runoff ratio; it
was that its value significantly exceeds 1.0. The perception that rivers bear more water than the
upstream rainfall was at last disproven.
As well-builder for the Palace of Versailles, Mariotte put his findings to practice. In the worlds
first application of hydrologic modeling, Mariotte calculated that 100 square kilometers should
supply the palace's water need. The channels, however, couldn't transmit the flow and so fared
the first application of hydrologic design.
Three Englishmen
English astronomer Edmond
Halley (1656-1742), son of an
industrial soap-maker, is best
remembered for the comet
honoring his name, but his
most influential contribution to
science was that of translating
the works of his friend Isaac
Newton from Latin to English.
Noting the likeness of comets observed in 1531, 1607 and 1682, Halley concluded that all three
were in fact the same object and correctly predicted its 1758 return. Halley's contribution to the
science of hydrology stemmed from the condensation on his optical equipment on clear day, 730
meters above the Mediterranean, making the astronomer to be among the first to appreciate the
magnitude of atmospheric water.

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Halley filled a 20-centimeter pan half-full with salt water and heated it to the temperature of a
summer day. In two hours, 0.5 ounces were evaporated. Estimating the surface of the
Mediterranean to be 1.9 million square kilometers -- actually, its 2.5 -- Halley calculated daily
evaporation to be 5.3 billion metric tons. (Lest the value seem unduly large, it corresponds to
slightly less than 3 millimeters/day. Modern meteorological records averaged over a full year
indicate about half that.)
By extrapolating from the estimated flow of the Thames, Halley concluded that evaporation from
the Mediterranean exceeds its river inflow and again extrapolated that there is sufficient
evaporation from the world's oceans to supply all the rivers and springs.
To bring his numbers into balance, he reported to the Royal Society that some of the vapor from
the sea swept against the high mountain tops gleets down" into caverns from where it flows back
to the sea. Mountains thus act as external alembics, distilling fresh water for the benefit of man
like so many veins in the microcosm.
"An Account of the Circulation of the Watery Vapors of the Sea, and of the Causes of Springs,"
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1686) explains how springs continue to flow
during periods when there was no rain.
Those Vapors therefore that are raised copiously in the Sea, and by the Winds are carried over
the low Land in those Ridges of Mountains, are there compelled by the stream of the Air to
mount up with it to the tops of the Mountains, where the Water presently precipitates, gleeting
down by the Crannies of the stone; and part of the Vapor entering into the Caverns of the Hills,
the Water thereof gathers as in an Alembick into the Basons of stone it finds, which being once
filled, all the overplus of Water that comes thither runs over by the lowest place, and breaking
out of the sides of the Hills, forms single Springs.
I doubt not but this Hypothesis is more reasonable than that of those who derive all Springs...
from a Filtration of Percolation of the Sea-waters through certain imaginary Tubes or Passages
within the Earth, wherein they lose their saltness.-His An Estimation of the Quantity of Vapor Raised out of the Sea, and the Cause of Springs
(1687) illustrates the caverns and rivers.

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Below is Halley's hydrologic model showing the caverns-springs-rivers route.
Clouds

Precipitation

Ocean

Rivers

Caverns

Springs

We will return to Halley's condensation hypothesis as it relates to caves in Chapter 40, but before
then, well meet the astronomer looking further downwards in Chapter 15, Hollow Earth
Geophysics.
Charles Hutton (1737-1823) was an encyclopedist, striving to sort the
burgeoning set of scientific findings into an objective framework.
Following are several entries from his A Mathematical and Philosophical
Dictionary, Containing an Explanation of the Terms, and an Account of
the Several Subjects (1795).

As to what would become to be todays common understanding of the

hydrologic cycle,
The most general and probable opinion among philosophers, on the formation of Springs, is,
that they are owing to rain. The rain-water penetrates the earth till such time as it meets a
clayey soil, or stratum; which proving a bottom sufficiently solid to sustain and stop its descent,
it glides along it that way to which the earth declines, till, meeting with a place or aperture on
the surface, through which it may escape, it forms a Spring, and perhaps the head of a stream
or brook.
Regarding Perraults 6:1 rainfall/runoff ratio,
Now, that the rain is sufficient for this effect, appears from hence, that upon calculating the
quantity of rain and snow which falls yearly on the tract of ground that is to furnish, for instance,
the water of the Seine, it is found that this river does not take up above one sixth part of it.
Hutton understood enough basic hydraulics to envision the upper slopes of a nearby mountain
feeding a geologic stratum that curves below nearby valleys to rise elsewhere.
And if we sometimes see Springs on high grounds, and even on the tops of mountains, they
must come from other remoter places, considerably higher, along beds of clay, or clayey
ground, as in their natural channels. So that if there happen to be a valley between a mountain
on whose top is a Spring, and the mountain which is to furnish it with water, the Spring must be
considered as water conducted from a reservoir of a certain height, through a subterraneous
channel, to make a jet of an almost equal height.
Hutton, however, perpetuated Halley's subterranean cavern theory.
The tops of mountains usually abound with cavities and subterraneous caverns, formed by
nature to serve as reservoirs; and their pointed summits, which seem to pierce the clouds, stop
those vapors which float in the atmosphere; which being thus condensed, they precipitate in
water, and by their gravity and fluidity easily penetrate through beds of sand and the lighter

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earth, till they become stopped in their descent by the denser strata, such as beds of clay,
stone, &c, where they form a basin or cavern, and working a passage horizontally, or a little
declining, they issue out at the sides of the mountains.
Refuting those who hold to underground rivers from the sea,
Some naturalists therefore have recourse to the sea, and derive the origin of Springs
immediately from thence. But how the sea-water should be raised up to the surface of the
earth, and even to the tops of the mountains, is a difficulty, in the solution of which they cannot
agree.
Regarding Halley's condensation caves,
Others... set aside the alembics, and think it enough that there be large subterranean reservoirs
of water at the height of the sea, from whence the warmth of the bottom of the earth, &c, may
raise vapors which pervade not only the intervals and fissures of the strata, but the bodies of
the strata themselves, and at length arrive near the surface; where, being condensed by the
cold, they glide along on the first bed of clay they meet with, till they issue forth by some
aperture in the ground.
In support of Perraults rainfall-alone explanation,
The water that is supposed to ascend from the depths of the sea, or from subterranean canals
proceeding from it, through the porous parts of the earth, as it rises in capillary tubes, ascends
to no great height, and in much too small a quantity to furnish springs with water, as Perrault
has sufficiently shewn.
As they share the same surname, perhaps here we should mention the Rev. John Hutton, who
wrote on the subject a century later. The latter Hutton's A Tour to the Caves, in the Environs of
Ingle Borough and Settle, in the West-Riding of Yorkshire (1880, 1881) noted two underground
streams crossing without mixing.
The springs were entirely dependent on the rains.
Though we met with many streams below the earth; yet we could easily find they originally
descended from its surface, and not from any distillations against the sides of the caves.
Much had indeed be learned between Hutton I and Hutton II.
Over his lifetime, John Dalton (1760-1844) made over 200,000
meteorological observations, the basis of his Experiments and
Observations to Determine Whether the Quantity of Rain and Dew is
Equal to the Quantity of Water Carried off by the Rivers and Raised by
Evaporation, with an Enquiry into the Origin of Springs (1802).
After correction for missing areas, Dalton estimated the mean rainfall and
snowfall (water equivalent) for England and Wales to be 79 centimeters.
He added 13 centimeters for annual dewfall. To estimate the total river
outflow, he divided the country into catchments and from the flow of the
Thames and the relative sizes of the watersheds, obtained 33
centimeters.
Dalton monitored the long-term water balance of a soil-filled container to estimate 76 centimeters
for the annual evapotranspiration loss.
79 centimeters of rain and snow
+ 13 centimeters of dew
92 centimeters of inflow
33 centimeters of streamflow
+ 76 centimeters of evaporation
109 centimeters of outflow

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Dalton attributed the discrepancy to overestimated evaporation and non-representativeness
locations.
Upon the whole then I think that we can finally conclude that the rain and dew of this country
are equivalent to the quantity of water carried off by evaporation and by the rivers. And as
nature acts upon general laws, we ought to infer, that it must be the case in every other country
until the contrary is proved.
Dalton's finding is a prime example of Ockham's Razor, Chapter 10. When choosing between
conflicting, but incompatible, explanations, the simper of the explanations is more likely to be the
better. Dalton's finding calls upon but four quantifiable hydrologic estimates, no unseen routes or
mechanisms and no unique physical relationships.
We should not close this chapter secure that science has triumphed, however. Skepticism is too
much a part of human nature. Nearly a century later, the German geologist Otto Volger (18221897) in The Scientific Solution to the Water Issue with Respect to the Supply of Cities (1877)
categorically denied any relation between rainfall and groundwater. Volger also maintained that
concern for groundwater contamination was a fear of phantoms which would impose unnecessary
costs on public water wells.
We began this chapter with a list of fallacious hydrological propositions commonly held until the
time of Newton.
Mechanisms such as wind, capillary action or wave action can draw large quantities of water
from the earths interior.
Sea water can lose its salt by infiltrating through soil.
Rainfall is insufficient to account for all water discharged by rivers.
Rainfall cannot infiltrate into the ground in large quantities.
Rudimentary measurements disprove all four.
An ocean-to-mountain underground river becomes unnecessary when rainfall exceeds
streamflow. It seems, therefore -- if we allow ourselves a bit of reflection -- that Chapters 8-10
was spent looking for engines that need not exist.
The fifth perception, however -- that the earth contains a large network of caverns and rivers -yet eluded testing.
Eliminating hydrologic necessity for underground rivers does not dispel the possibility of their
existence.
Did quantifying the hydrologic cycle remove underground rivers from theological interest?
Not at all. As we will see in the next chapter, it confirmed Christianity.

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Chapter 13 -- Hydrotheology/Theohydrology

CHAPTER 13
HYDROTHEOLOGY/THEOHYDROLOGY

"Idroteologia/Teoidrologia"(1504), Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo

The above collaboration is penultimate proof of unity of hydrology and theology. Or at least it will
be proof, once the work's authenticity is verified. The hand of each master cannot be denied and
it is speculated that the two met in Florence.
"Natural theology" refers not to a theology particular to the physical world, but rather to the
epistemological distinction between what may be known through revelation and what may be
known through by human sensibility and reason.
The theological challenge in da Vincis and Michelangelo's time was that of reconciling biblical
cosmology with new-found Humanism, a challenge that morphed over the subsequent two
centuries into that of that of validating Biblical inerrancy in an increasingly-quantifiable terrestrial
sphere.
The three phases in theologys adjustment to human experience:
Dismissal of unsettling evidence. We saw this in Chapter 4, The Cross.
Floundering dogma. Christendom was intellectually challenged by Renaissance thought, the
subject of Chapter 7.
Reconciliation with ascertained fact. Seventeenth-century theologians sought attributes of God
in the heavens (astronomy), the inhabitants (biology), and the earth (geology). The chapter
at hand relates how a church that not long before had insisted on the existence of
underground rivers came to espouse hydrologic science that dispelled the need for such
waters.
Perhaps more than any chapter in our journey, this one revolves on intellectual conflict.
Respected voices were weighing in from all perspectives. The advocates for science would
eventually dominate the advocates for revelation, but not without determined effort.
Era of the Scientific Revolution (1550-1700)
As the Scientific Revolution called for a mechanical, not magical, Creation, the Hand of God was
perceived as that of a master mechanic. The vast complexity of an intricately-interlocking,
precisely-tuned physical world stands as our signpost to the Creator's infinite design.

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This wasn't new thought at the time. According to Aquinas, the existence of God can be proven
in five ways, the first four being arguments from motion, efficient causes, possibility and necessity
and gradation of being.
Aquinas's fifth way is argument from design. Observe that animate natural bodies lacking
intelligence work toward some goal, and do so not by chance. As an arrow reaches its target
because it is so directed by an archer, so that which lacks intelligence achieves its goal by being
directed by another intelligence. Therefore some intelligent being must exist by whom all natural
things are directed to their end. This being may be called God.
God as the archer wasn't a productive analogy to those in the forefront of in the Scientific
Revolution, but such shortcoming didn't necessarily hinder the era's energetic cross-country
ramblers and specimen collectors from pronouncing that proof of God was manifest in their
footpaths.
Perception of Divine Providence, in fact, enabled the fledgling Scientific Revolution to thrive under
the religious dogma that it would later come to expel from scholarly inquiry.
When Isaac Newton was but a lad, "physico-theology," a strain of natural theology that
interpreted regularity and functionality as proof of God's guarantee of a stable, anthropocentric
world, came into being.
And what might better prove God's grace than His establishment of natural and perpetual
replenishment of that which sustains human kind/?
The hydrologic cycle fit the bill.
Biblical assurance in one hand and instruments of hydrologic measurement in the other, the
Christian apologist could sally forward.
But thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight. -- Wisdom 11:21
God

God

Springs

Ocean
Humankind

Humankind
Revealed Theology

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La Sepmaine, ou, Creation du Monde (1578) by Guillaume de
Salluste du Bartas, a Huguenot, was an influential account of
Creation in which the hydrologic cycle exemplifies how its closure
provides for man.
One while, he sees how the ample Sea doth take
The Liquid homage of each other Lake;
And how again the Heavns exhale, form it,
Abundant vapors (for our benefit).
And yet it swells not for those tribute streams,
Nor yet it shrinks not for those boiling beams.

John Donne's Christmas Day sermon, 1624, put it succinctly,

One of the most convenient hieroglyphics of God is a circle ...
and a circle is endless; His sun and moon and stars move
circularly.

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An Apologie (1627) by English clergyman George Hakewill asserted that, "The power and
providence of God in the government of the world" and censured, "the common error touching
nature's perpetual and universal decay.
The "weighty authority of Solomon, "the wisest man that ever lived, spoke for "the circulation of
all things as it were in a ring... running round of all things." Both the wind and the water move in
circuits.
Whereupon he infers the thing that hath been, it is that that shall be, and that which is done, is
that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.
Specific to the theohydrology of underground rivers, we turn to
another member of the clergy, John Swan, author of Speculum
Mundi (1635), or
A glass representing the face of the world: showing both that it
did begin, and must also end: the whole of which may be fitly
called an hexameron or discourse of the clauses, continuance,
and qualities of things in nature, occasioned as matter pertinent
to the work done in the six days of the world's creation.
The frontispiece, rife with esoteric symbolism, is shown to the
right.

Swans encyclopedic arrangement of science according to the days of Creation embodies the
conflict between science and scripture, superstition and belief.
The air is now corrupted and the fruits of the earth of a feeble nourishment." The Flood
wrought damage through the action of the salt waters of the great deep, and also by way of
vapors or... exhalations.
Swan's answers to six self-addressed hydrological questions.
How the waters were gathered together?
For the efficient cause of the sea was the only word of God.
How it can be said that they were gathered to one place; seeing there be many seas, lakes,
rivers, and fountains that are far asunder?
Every part of the water is joined unto the whole as it were with arms and legs, and veins
diversely dilated and stretched out.
Whether they be higher than the earth?
Suppose that certain springs arise out of the highest mountains, must the sea therefore needs
be higher than those mountains? Surely I think not. For albeit I be not of Aristotle's mind, nor
of their opinions who do not derive the rivers from the seas, nor make subscription onto them
who give a sucking and an attractive power to the veins of the earth; yet I find it as a thing
possible, although that part of the sea which lieth opposite to the heads of the fountain, or to a
place where the water first breaketh out, be lower than the ground, that the said water may
neverless easily ascend, and not break forth until it finds a place convenient. Now this ascent
is caused by the sea, which, seeing it is a vast body, is very ponderous and heavy, and cannot
be thrust back by the waters at the head of the fountain opposite to it, but rather it doth potently
and strenuously crowd on the said water through the hollow ports and passages of the earth,
until at the last is springeth forth.

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It's the weight-of-the-sea engine, a proposed subterranean engine we reviewed in Chapter 10.
Whether there be more water than earth?
When God commanded the waters to be gathered, he gathered them into the seventh part of
the earth, and dried up the six other parts.
Whether the earth can be founded upon the waters?
The Psalmist seemeth of affirm it.
Why the seas be salt, and the rivers fresh?
If therefore Aristotle's aerial vapors have anything to do in this generation, it is as much as
nothing.
This freshness, notwithstanding their salt origin, may be ascribed to percolation and straining
through the narrow spongy passages of the earth, which makes them leave behind (as an
exacted toll) the color, thickness, and saltness.
We're familiar with Chapter 11's salt-straining earth.
What causeth an ebbing and flowing in the sea, rather than in rivers?
It is a great secret of nature, and gives us therefore principal occasion to magnify the power of
God, whose name only is excellent, and whose power above heaven and earth.
As revealed theology, Speculum offered little not already centuries old. As natural theology, it
relied on science already disproven. We'll give Swan credit, however, for trying to bridge the gap.
Neo-Platonist and royal chaplain to William III, Thomas Burnet sought to explain,
The origin of the earth, and all of the general changes which it hath already undergone or is to
undergo till the consummation of all things.
Burnet's Telluris Theoria Sacra (1684) tells how the earth was fluid chaos until the heavier parts
sunk to form a fiery core, leaving a thin earthen crust upon a watery abyss. The earth was of
perfect mathematical form, smooth and beautiful, "like an egg," with neither seas nor islands nor
valleys nor rocks, "with not a wrinkle, scar, or fracture."

All Creation was equally perfect. There were no alternating seasons, storms or rivers. It rained
only at the poles from where the water filtered into the soil and flowed underground to the
inhabited tropics.
But sin led to the breaking up of the "foundations of the great deep" and the fertile superficial
layer was dried by the sun and began to crack until the colder waters below burst upward,

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causing mountains, abysses and islands. Had there been a sea before the deluge, sinners would
have learned to build ships and could have saved themselves.
When the earths crust collapsed, air was trapped under the rubble, but with time, the air escaped
and was replaced by waters connected by underground passages. To visualization such,
We must take off the cover of all subterraneous places and deep caverns, to see the inside of
the earth; and lay bare the roots of mountains, to look into those holes and vaults that are
under them, filld sometimes with fire, sometimes with water, and sometimes with thick air and
vapors.
It is Genesis retold per the science of the day.
When God created heaven and earth, He also created underground rivers. If they don't service
us as well as they used to, it's because of our sin.
John Ray, a devout Anglican, was a forerunner of Linnaeus in
biologic taxonomy. The son of a blacksmith, Ray became
professor of Greek at age 20 and later a professor of
mathematics. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of
Creation (1691) was followed by Three Physico-Theological
Discourses (1693).
The sea, what infinite variety of fishes doth it nourish! How
doth it exactly compose itself to a level, of equal supercies,
and in the earth make one spherical roundness? How doth is
constantly observe its ebbs and flows, and still retain its
saltiness, so convenient for the maintenance of its Inhabitants,
serving also the uses of man for navigation, and the
convenience of carriage?
Ray refuted Burnet's view of mountains as blemishes on the
earths surface. Among other benefits to humanity, mountains
provide boundaries, produce springs and rivers and contain
caves providing refuge for Christians.

To Ray, the hydrologic cycle is a unifying concept that incorporates a remarkable range of facts.
In light of his own observations and the findings of Perrault and Mariotte (Chapter 12), Ray
supported the pluvial theory by correlating the relative size of watersheds to the magnitudes of
their respective waterways.

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Burnet's Deluge theory involved waters upwelling and returning
into the Abyss, a sequence of conceptual nature, but when
numerically pursued in John Keill's An Examination of Dr. Burnet's
Theory of the Earth, Together with Some Remarks on Mr.
Whiston's New Theory of the Earth (1698), one that failed to add
up.
And as for rivers, I believe it is evident, that they are furnished
by a superior circulation of vapors drawn from the sea by the
heat of the sun, which by calculation are abundantly sufficient
for such a supply. For it is certain that nature never provides
two distinct ways to produce the same effect, when one will
serve.
It's Ockhams Razor from Chapter 10.

As for Whiston's New Theory of the Earth (to which we gave mention in Chapter 7), Keill's
thoughts converge from two directions, the first arguing against the Kircherian hydrophylacia
(Chapter 9, Thermodynamic Engines) to which Whiston subscribed.
But the increase and decrease of rivers, according to wet and dry seasons of the year, do
sufficiently show their origination from a superior circulation of rains and vapors. For if they
were furnished by vapors exhaled from the Abyss through subterraneous pipes and channels, I
see no reason why this subterraneous fire, which always acts equally, should not always
equally produce the same effect in dry weather that it does in wet.
In short, the earth's fire wouldn't burn in seasons.
Keill's second objection is less cerebral; he inquired regarding evidence.
I know the maintainers of this opinion... allege that there are springs and fountains on the tops
of mountains which cannot easily be maintained by a superior circulation of vapors, but I beg
those gentlemen's pardon, for I can give no credit to any such observations, for I am well
assured that there are none of those springs in some places where it is said they are. And
particularly that learned and diligent observer of Nature Mr. Edward Lloyd, the Keeper of the
[Oxford] Museum Ashmolean, assured me, that throughout all his travels over Wales, he could
observe no such thing as a running spring on the top of a mountain. On these considerations, I
think it is not in the least probable that rivers and springs proceed from vapor that is raised by a
subterraneous heat through the fissures of the mountains
To the best of Keill's knowledge, no one had ever seen a spring issuing from a mountain top.
Post 1700
The authors in the remaining portion of the chapter, dutiful servants of God all, were expounding
into an increasingly secularized auditorium.

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We were introduced to Anglican clergyman, William Derham's
scientific inquisitiveness -- if not insight -- in Chapter 10,
Geophysical, Pneumatic and Electromagnetic Engines.
Derham found proof of Gods existence in Physico-Theology, or
A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1713) in
which all facets of physical geographic interactively give
evidence of "the most indulgent Creator."

The label "hydrotheology" was coined by Hamburg polymath

Johann Albert Fabricius as title for his 1734 treatise.
An Attempt through Observing the Properties, Distribution and
Movement of Water, to Encourage Human Beings to Love and
Admire the Benevolence of the Powerful Creator,
There is none which does not give us reasons to wonder at the
magnitude of the works of the Lord But nothing else might
move us more in this way than the combined consideration of
all the properties of water and of its beneficial relation to the
other creatures.
Topics included
The wise and liberal dispensation of water in the world, the
rivers, lakes, ponds, the water underground and the human
exploitation thereof.
The movement of water in the air, in the sea and in rivers and
its use in cooking, boiling, distillation and perspiration.
How the different physical properties of water combine in a senseful way in order to form a
hydrological cycle...
The benefit we draw from this evaporation of the waters, the uninterrupted circulation it
maintains with the aim of nourishing the creatures, keeping them alive and rendering them
fertile, offers us sensible proof of the wise power of the Creator.
As to the depth of such reflections, Mikls Vassnyi puts it kindly in Anima Mundi, the Rise of the
World Soul Theory in Modern German Philosophy (2011): Fabricius "belongs among the
intellectually less demanding philosophers of the physico-theological tradition."
Fabricius was one to hedge his bets, however, concerning where to find proof of God. He was
also the translator of Derham's Astrotheology (1728) and the author of Pyrotheologie (1732).
Friedrich Christian Lesser was a pastor with a prolific physico-theologic pen, his works including,

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Lithotheologie (1735), "A Natural History and Spiritual Consideration of Stones." which included
a section "Aerotheologie," by Fabricius.
Insecto-Theologie (1738), and
Testaceotheologie (1756), having to do with shells.
Pharmacotheology was another spinoff, in which physician Friedrich Hoffmann used natural
theology to justify the therapeutic use of herbs.
Astro- Pyro- , Litho-, Aero-, Insecto- and Pharmaco-. As a body of thought, hydrotheology
enjoyed good company.
John Wesley, the evangelist known for his advocacy of
Methodism, also applied his prodigious preaching skill to the
subject of earth science. Based on the Almighty finding the earth
and all created things "very good," Wesley declared in a 1750
sermon that no one can deny that "sin is the moral cause of
earthquakes, whatever their natural cause may be."
Regarding the provision of water on the land, Wesleys attributed
the larger role to evaporation.
That the vapor rising from the sea, are more than sufficient to
supply both the surface of the earth, and the rivers with water.
That the mountains, by their particular structure, arrest the
vapors that float in the atmosphere, and having collected them
in their reservoirs, dismiss them again through their sides, either
in perpetual or intermitting currents.

But, cognizant of Ecclesiastes, Wesleys A Survey of the Wisdom or God in Creation (1763)
added,
And yet we need not deny, that some springs may arise from the sea, or the great abyss, those
in particular, which at all times afford the same quantity of water.
Once again, the ancient tale.

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George Louis Lecrec Buffon, a Catholic, translated Newtons
Principia into French and directed what was to become Paris'
Museum of Natural History. In Theorie de la Terre, the first
volume of Histoire Naturelle (1749), Buffon assumed not a geocentral fire, but rather subterranean fire-hearths directly linked to
volcanoes and earthquakes, the Kircher graphic of Chapter 9.
Buffon argued that the earth was impermeable at a depth
beyond four feet where rainwater stagnates until flowing out as
springs. "Each river is a large lake that stretches out far
underground." is not far from sounding like an alluvial aquifer,
but in this case, he appears to have meant a literal lake.
Nature's service to mankind is proof of God's wisdom. That
underground rivers -- having never been actually observed -- did
not technically qualify as "phenomena" wasn't of concern on
Sunday.

Attributed to Swedish taxonomist Karl Linn (Linnaeus), but

actually the thesis of his student, Isaac Biberg, "The Oeconomy
of Nature" (1749) published in Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to
Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick (1762) by Benjamin
Stillingfleet, contains a picture of the hydrologic cycle.
The clouds collected from exhalations, chiefly from the sea,
but likewise from other waters, and moist grounds, and
condensed in the lower regions of the atmosphere, supply the
earth with rain; but since they are attracted by the
mountainous parts of the earth, it necessarily follows that
those parts must have, as is fit, a larger share of water than
the rest. Springs, which generally rush out at the foot of
mountains, take their rise from this very rain water, and vapors
condensed, that trickle through the holes, and interstices of
loose bodies, and are received into caverns.
This afford a pure water purged by straining, which rarely dry
up in summer, or freeze in winter, so that animals never want
a wholesome and refreshing liquor.
The chief sources of rivers are fountains, and rills growing by gradual supplies into still larger
and larger streams, till at last, after the conflux of a vast number of them, they find no stop, but
falling into the sea with lessened rapidity, they there deposit the united stores they have
gathered, along with foreign matter, and such earthy substances, as they soar off in their way.
Thus the water returns in a circle, whence it first drew its origin that it may act over the same
scene again.
As a scientist, Linnaeus had no intention of expounding upon the supremacy of Divine
Providence, but those so inclined were more than pleased with Linnaeus' thesis of natural order.
Hydrologic evidence of God's being was still touted into the mid-19th century, as evidenced in
Thomas Dick's The Christian Philosopher, or the Connection of Science with Religion (1842).
The all-wise Creator has impressed upon its various masses a circulating motion... The rills
pour their liquid stores into the rivers; the rivers roll their watery treasures into the ocean. By
the solar heat, a portion of these oceanic waters is carried up into the atmosphere, till at last it
descends in rain and dew, to supply the springs... so that there is a constant motion and

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Chapter 13 -- Hydrotheology/Theohydrology
circulation of the watery element, that it may serve as an agent for carrying forward the various
processes of nature, and for ministering to the wants of man and beast.
The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the
Creation (1834-40) derive from the bequest of the Rev. Francis Henry Egerton, eighth Earl of
Bridgewater, who died in 1829, leaving 8,000 for the Royal Society of London to commission
eminent scientists and philosophers to write, print, and publish 1,000 copies of a work
On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation illustrating such
work by all reasonable arguments as, for instance, the variety and formation of God's creatures,
in the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms; the effect of digestion and thereby of
conversion; the construction of the hand of man and an infinite variety of other arguments; as
also by discoveries ancient and modern in arts, sciences, and the whole extent of modern
literature
The Royal Society
determined that the money
should be assigned to eight
authorities for as many
distinct treatises.

I. On the Adaptation of
External Nature to the Moral
and Intellectual Constitution
of Man (1833) by Thomas
Chalmers

DRAFT

II. On the Adaptation of

External Nature to the
Physical Condition of Man
(1837) by J. Kidd

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Chapter 13 -- Hydrotheology/Theohydrology

III. Astronomy and General

Physics 1839) by William
Whewell

IV. The Hand, its

Mechanism and Vital
Endowments as Evincing
Design (1837) by Charles
Bell

V. Animal and Vegetable

Physiology Considered with
Reference to Natural
Theology (1840) by Peter
Roget

VI. Geology and

Mineralogy Considered with
Reference to Natural
Theology (1837) by William
Buckland

VII. History, Habits and

Instincts of Animals (1835)
by William Kirby

VIII. Chemistry,
Meteorology, and the
Function of Digestion (1834)
by William Prout

The treatises were unequal merit, but even the best haven't withstood the test to time, partly
because of scientific advancement, but more due to the authors' wholesale abandonment of
objectivity.
We'll quote from just two, one ill-conceived and the other, fairly even-handed, given the work's
commission.
From History, Habits, and Instincts of Animals,
The word of God, in many places, speaks of an abyss of waters under the earth, as distinct
from the ocean though in communication with it, and also as contributing to form springs and
rivers.
Scientific men, in the present day, appear disposed to question this; the Geologist, though he
may regard the granitic strata as forming the base, as it were, of the crust of the earth, seems
rather to view it as containing a focus of heat, than a magazine of infinite waters; from whence
are partly derived the springs and rivers that water the earth's surface, and ultimately make
good to the ocean its whole loss by evaporation.
"Springs," says the author above quoted [Conrad Malte-Brun, coauthor of Geographie
Mathematique (1803-12)] "are so many little reservoirs, which receive their waters from the
neighboring ground, through small lateral channels." He allows, however, that the origin of
springs cannot be referred to one exclusive cause, and associates with that just mentioned, the
precipitation of atmospheric vapors attracted by high lands, the dissolving of ice, the filtering of
sea-waters, and the explosion of subterraneous vapors. He makes no direct mention of a
storehouse of waters in the bosom of the earth as in any case the source of springs and rivers,
but allows that

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Chapter 13 -- Hydrotheology/Theohydrology
"The phenomena of capillary tubes may obtain in its interior. The sea-waters, deprived of
their salt and bitter elements, may ascend through the imperceptible pores of several rocks,
from which, being disengaged by the heat, they will form those subterraneous vapors to
which many springs owe their origin."
A very slight alteration of this passage would make it harmonize with the Scripture account of
the matter...
By the time of this writing, subterranean vapors -- and we're just flagging one assertion -- had
been eliminated from the hydrologic cycle and were not a fact to rephrase as Holy Word.
Astronomy and General Physics more successfully stayed with science. The author understood
the hydrologic cycle as a quantitative process, and while resorting to "blood of the veins" wording
(an ancient theory we covered in the latter part of Chapter 8), he did so as analogy, not
justification.
Another office of water which it discharges by means of its relations to heat is that of supplying
our springs. There can be no doubt that the old hypotheses which represent springs as
drawing their supplies from large subterranean reservoirs of water, or from the sea by a
process of subterraneous filtration, are erroneous and untenable. The quantity of evaporation
from water and from wet ground is found to be amply sufficient to supply the requisite drain.
Mr. Dalton calculated that the quantity of rain which falls in England is thirty-six inches a year.
Of this he reckoned that thirteen inches flow off to the sea by the rivers, and that the remaining
twenty- three inches are raised again from the ground by evaporation. The thirteen inches of
water are of course supplied by evaporation from the sea, and are carried back to the land
through the atmosphere. Vapor is perpetually rising from the ocean, and is condensed in the
hills and high lands, and through their pores and crevices descends, till it is deflected, collected,
and conducted out to the bay, by some stratum or channel which is watertight.
The condensation which takes place in the higher parts of the country may easily be
recognized in the mists and rains which are the frequent occupants of such regions. The
coldness of the atmosphere and other causes precipitate the moisture in clouds and showers,
and in the former as well as in the latter shape, it is condensed and absorbed by the cool
ground. Thus a perpetual and compound circulation of the waters is kept up..., the water
ascending perpetually by a thousand currents through the air, and descending by the gradually
converging branches of the rivers, till it is again returned into the great reservoir of the ocean.
As the work needed to spiritually agree with the late of Earl of Bridgewater, however, it goes on to
celebrate the evidence of higher guidance.
It is maintained by machinery very different, indeed, from that of the human system, but
apparently as well, and, therefore, we may say as clearly, as that, adapted to its purposes.

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Chapter 13 -- Hydrotheology/Theohydrology
While Archbishop William Paley offered no particular insight
regarding underground waters, we mustn't skip his Natural
Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the
Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802) in
which he introduced the famous metaphor of the watchmaker.
When we come to inspect the watch, we perceive... that its
several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g.,
that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion,
and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the
day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped
from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in
any other order than that in which they are placed, either no
motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or
none which would have answered the use that is now served
by it... the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must
have had a maker -- that there must have existed, at some
time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who
formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer,
who comprehended its construction and designed its use.

If God has taken such care in winding the machine of nature, how much more must He care for
us wretched sinners!
Springs

Ocean
Paley's watchmaker analogy faded in the subsequent centuries until John Archibald Wheeler,
colleague of Albert Einstein and coiner the term "black hole," re-popularized the thesis in his
forward to The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), by John Barrow and Frank Tipler.
What's come to be known as "Intelligent Design" argues that a "life-giving factor lies at the center
of the whole machinery and design of the world."
Alliance between God and the hydrologic cycle has proven itself to be a persistent assertion.

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

CHAPTER 14
FOUNTAINS OF THE NILE
Seeing the nature and origin of this hidden source deserves to be as much enquired into
as that of the Nile did formerly, let us pass through these subterraneous waters with the
sails of our reason.
Bernardino Ramazzini, De Fontium Mutinensium (1691)
The Nile does not receive a single visible affluent; nevertheless, it must necessarily be
replenished by several underground tributaries, for its liquid mass is much more
considerable in Egypt than in Nubia.
Elisee Reclus, The Earth: A Descriptive History of the Phenomena of the Life of the
Globe (1871)
We've worked our way through a few thousand years of changing perception regarding
underground rivers. This chapter will be structured somewhat differently, holding itself to one
particular question, the mystery of the Nile. We'll revisit thinkers and explorers from previous
chapters and acquaint ourselves with others.
Where does the River Nile begin? There have been many explanations.
The first involves the whims of gods of the underworld, how nature has often been first
conceived.
The second is through the eyes of the Jews. The Nile is the River Gihon, said to emerge from
the Paradise.
Then follows the correct explanation, though steeped in controversy until remarkably recently.
The greater Nile begins as the White Nile from as lakes of Uganda. While the hydrology is
essentially on the surface, subterranean aspects have long been perceived.
The next asserts the Blue Nile of modern Ethiopia to be the source, a theory that persisted
remarkably long. As with the White Nile, Blue Nile streamflow generally falls within the domain
of surface hydrology, but expectation of "fountains" biased early perception.
The fifth looks to the west for a trans-African waterway, perhaps having a subterranean
component where desert intervenes.
The final thoughts span a spectrum of far-flung conduits mentioned by imaginative
geographers.
We'll focus on suppositions involving subterranean waters.
Egyptian Gods
It is not believed that the prehistoric civilization of the Nile delta ventured above the river's first
great cataract, but they would have heard of the remarkable countercurrents in which a boatman
could drift 100 kilometers further upstream. From such tales came belief that two Niles rose at
the cataract, one flowing north, the other, south.

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

Mythology conceived the Nile as a great circle, an invisible
southward subterranean river surfacing at two caverns in the
cataract, from where it flows northward.
To the right, after a relief showing
the Nile god Hapi, surrounded by
a protective serpent, pouring the
Nile waters from two bases hidden
beneath the rocks. A vulture and
a hawk perch on a rocky overhang.

A hieroglyphic inscription still on a rock near the first cataract,

The wonderful island Elephantine. On it was built the first city that was ever known in the
world, and out of it rises the Sun. Within the island is a great cavern, which is in two parts,
each shaped like the breast of a woman, and inside this cavern is the source of the Nile.
The two branches of the Nile were also said to rise into the upper world as fountains springing
from vases held by the underworld god Osiris, tale yet recounted a millennia later in "Noah and
his Family," The Monist, April 1919, by W. Max Muller and M. Milman,
Osiris, the Lord of Eternity, who once floated about in his miraculous chest and now sits on his
throne at the source of the Nile and of all waters.
In another version, the king goes at death to dwell in the refrigerium
at the first cataract, where he is purified by Khnum and Satis
(pictured to the right), gods of Elephantine, who each hold a vase
from which spring the two Niles.

Whether the bearers are Hopi, Osiris, Khnum or Satis, there are
generally two vases issuing into the upper world.

Astrology also provided a framework for mythology. The Egyptians

associated the river's flooding at Memphis with the brightest star in
the night sky, Sirius, the Star of Isis. As from 3000 to 1000 BC, the
rising of this star at sunrise coincided with the flood season, the star
was thought to draw up the waters/

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

The Roman poet Lucan ((39-65) summarized the astrological explanation in Pharsalia.
Some there are who think that there are channels in the earth and vast inlets in the hollow
structure. This way through secret courses does the water glide from the interior, attracted to
the mid region of the earth from the arctic colds, when Phoebus [Apollo] presses upon Meroe
[Kush] and the scorched earth thither draws the waters. Both Ganges and Padus [Po] are
drawn through the secret regions of the world. Then is Nile, discharging all the rivers from one
source, unable to give them vent at a single mouth.
As the role of the pyramids in such mysteries is known to a select few, we'll include an update on
that aspect in Chapter 63, Cargo Conveyance.
With the honing of philosophical thought, however, attribution of physical nature to supernatural
vagrancies became intellectually less satisfying.
Judeo-Christian Lore
As we noted in Chapter 4, Genesis 2 speaks of the Edenic River Gihon. Ezekiel, Isaiah, Joshua
and Jeremiah mention the Nile by name, but nowhere do scriptures equate the two. Hebrew
association of the Nile with the Gihon, however, was noted by Flavius Josephus in The Antiquities
of the Jews (c. 93 AD).
Gihon runs through Egypt, and denotes what arises from the east, which the Greeks call Nile.
Early Christians
accepted lore of a
primal underground
Gihon, as evidenced
by Cosmas (Chapter
4) who believed the
world to be shaped
like a tabernacle with
a central landmass is
surrounded by an unnavigable Oceanus
which, in turn, is
surrounded the
Paradise of Adam.
From the eastern
portion Paradise flow
the four sacred rivers
under Oceanus to the
present world.

Non-navigable Oceanus
Paradise

Antediluvian

Gautier de Metz's L'Image du Monde (c. 1246), a work based on Imago Mundi by Honorius of
Autun (d. 1151) surfaced the Nile headwaters in distant Asia, then bringing the river westward.
The second of the four floods is named Gihon or Nylus, which entreth into the earth by a pool,
and runneth under the earth.
Metz embellishes, however, as Genesis makes no mention of "under the earth,"
And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of
Ethiopia.
"Ethiopia," we should note, was generally applied by the Greeks to designate the south of Africa,
the region inhabited by Blacks.

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

To the right, an anonymous 15th-century map
showing the Nile rising in distant Asia, then flowing
to Africa. The three other Rivers of Life can be
seen likewise directed to the ancient world.

From A New Commentary on Genesis (1888) by Franz Delitzsch,

The Nile was regarded as the Araxes, flowing [from Paradise] on subterraneously and
reappearing in Egypt... According to the ancient view, the Nile comes from Asia into Africa, the
Persian Gulf and the Red Sea being considered inland seas. Inspiration does not in things
natural raise its subject above the state of contemporary information.
As we will shortly see, however, as mapping dispensed with such a land bridge, the source of the
mighty river must be closer to home.

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

The White Nile

First Cataract
Lake Victoria
Lake Albert
Lake Edward
Ruwenzori Mountains, "Mountains of the Moon"
Lake Tana
Simien Mountains
Nile
Blue Nile
White Nile
The White Nile flows from Lake Victoria in modern Uganda
and then courses through Lake Albert on its northward
journey.

White Nile
Lake
Alpert
Ruwenzori
Mountains
Lake
Edward
"The Mountains of the Moon,"
Illustrated London News, February 1 1890

Lake
Victoria

First identified by Stanley in the 1880s, the snow-capped Ruwenzoris are Ptolemys "Mountains
of the Moon," one of the most enduring apocryphal elements in the history of cartography.
A lake nearly as large as Lake Victoria once covered the basin's marshy plain further north. In
ages past it may still have been vast enough to suggest to Egyptians a sea opening to the Indian
Ocean. The mountains, vaguely visible from its banks, would have been the Ruwenzoris.
The Nile's origin was of great interest to Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC). From his Histories,
With regard to the sources of the Nile, I have found no one among all those with whom I have
conversed, whether Egyptians, Libyans, or Greeks, who professed to have any knowledge,
except a single person. He was the scribe who kept the register of the sacred treasures of
Minerva in the city of Sais, and he did not seem to me to be in earnest when he said that he
knew them perfectly well. His story was as follows:
"Between Syene, a city of the Thebais, and Elephantine, there are two hills with sharp conical
tops; the name of the one is Crophi, of the other, Mophi. Midway between them are the
fountains of the Nile, fountains which it is impossible to fathom. Half the water runs
northward into Egypt, half to the south towards Ethiopia."
The fountains were known to be unfathomable, he declared, because Psammetichus, an
Egyptian king, had made trial of them. He had caused a rope to be made, many thousand
fathoms in length, and had sounded the fountain with it, but could find no bottom.

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

Herodotus' " " translates more appropriately as "sources of the Nile," not an
artesian feature. "Fountains" however, are what later Europeans came to envision.
Herodotus noted that the ancients also believed that the Nile derives from two great mountains in
southern Ethiopia having eternal springs which lessen in winter by the attraction of the sun.
Unlike mythological explanations, this one has physical basis. The Father of History spurned this
belief, however, based upon his observation that in traveling towards the equator, the climate
becomes hotter. How could snow fall in such a place?
Ephorus (c. 400-330 BC) thought that there were deep springs in the Nile's bed which gushed
forth with great force in summer.
The Romans were curious regarding the Nile's source, per the words of Lucan.
Cesar's desire to know our Nilus' spring
Possessed the Egyptian, Persian, Grecian king.
No age but strived to future time to teach
This skill: none yet his hidden nature reach.
Philip's great son, Memphis' most honored king,
Sent to earth's utmost bounds, to find Nile's spring,
The first recorded expedition up the White Nile was undertaken by two Roman centurions, but
they failed to penetrate the great swamps.
Pausanias (110-180) informs us in Description of Greece,
Those Greeks or Egyptians who have gone up into Ethiopia beyond Syene as far as the
Ethiopian city of Meroe all say that the Nile enters a lake, and passes through it as though it
were dry land, and that after this it flows through lower Ethiopia into Egypt.
Pliny (23-79) loosely quotes from Plato's Timaeus (c. 360 BC),
The source of the river is known by the name of Phiala, and that the stream buries itself in
channels underground, where it sends forth vapors generated by the heat among the steaming
rocks amid which it conceals itself; but that, during the days of the inundation, in consequence
of the sun approaching nearer to the earth, the waters are drawn forth by the influence of his
heat, and on being thus exposed to the air, overflow; after which, in order that it may not be
utterly dried up, the stream hides itself once more.
"The stream buries itself in channels underground" implies downward direction, however, at
variance with Timaeus, viz,
The Nile, who is our never-failing savior, delivers and preserves us. Whereas in this land,
neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having
always a tendency to come up from below; for which reason the traditions preserved here are
the most ancient.
As Pliny, not Plato, would become the geographic authority for centuries thereafter, the former's
"buries itself" would become entrenched in European thought.
Marinus of Tyre recorded that the Greek trader Diogenes traveled from today's Tanzanian coast
for 25 days in about 50 AD, encountering two great lakes and a snowy range of mountains.
Influenced by Marinus, Claudius Ptolemys second-century Geographia showed the "Mountains
of the Moon." Although Ptolemys original maps are lost, mediaeval copies came to be the
unchallenged representation through the 16th century, their identifying characteristic being sideby-side headwater lakes, and to the south, Mountains. Below are several renditions.

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

.
c. 1320

1482

1489

c. 1535

1554

1578

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

We repeat Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus
(1665) graphic of the African hydrophylacium.
The principal hydrophylacium of Africa,
located in the Mountains of the Moon, lakes
and rivers flowing strong at the newly
discovered origin of the Nile.

The truth, however, is less dramatic.

The Nile's longest pathway bubbles from

Rwanda's Nyungwe Forest and flows from
there to Lake Victoria

DRAFT

Tradition, however, maintains that the river

arises from upwellings along the lake's bank.

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

The Blue Nile
Lake
Tanat

The Blue Nile flows from Ethiopia's Lake

Tana, and joins the White at Khartoum

Gish
Blue
Nile

The hydrograph indicates the

contribution of the Nile's three
major tributaries, the Ethiopian
River Atbara being below the
confluence of the Blue and White.
As the Blue Nile constitutes the
majority of the flood peak, it is
understandable that Egyptians
took it to be the defining tributary.

Discharge
(million cubic meters/day)

Mt. Gish lies within the Blue Nile's clockwise

loop, 110 kilometers below Late Tana.

700
600

Atbara

500
400

Blue Nile

300

White Nile

200
100
0

Jan

Dec

The 12th-century Beatus world map showing

the White and Blue Niles crossing. Our
journey is awash with "subterranean rivers."
Chapter 76 deals with "submarine rivers."
Here we have a "subriverine river."

A Short Relation of the River Nile, of Its

Source and Current (1669) by Jeronimo
Lobo, who passed through East Africa in
1629, describes what the author took to be
the Nile's headwaters
In this territory of Toncua is the known head and source of the River Nile, by the natives called
Abani (i.e.) the Father of Waters... The head rises in the most pleasant recess of the territory,
having two springs, called Eyes, each about the bigness of a coach wheel, distant twenty
paces. These two springs rise in a little field covered over with green and thick wood... This
plain is on the top of a high mountain, overlooking many spacious valleys and from this height
insensibly descends... At little more than three days journey from the Head, the river is large,
deep enough for vessels to sail in.

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In looking for twin Ptolemaic waterbodies in the hills, Lobo found them, albeit smaller than
anticipated. He wouldn't be the first to be confused.
Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus includes an account from the journal of Pedro Paez, who likewise
visited the site.
On the 21st of April, in the year 1618...I discovered first two round fountains, each about four
palms in diameter, and saw, with the greatest delight, what neither Cyrus king of the Persians,
nor Cambyses, nor Alexander the Great, nor the famous Julius Caesar, could ever discover.
The two openings of these fountains have no issue in the plain on the top of the mountain, but
flow from the root of it. The second fountain lies about a stone-cast west from the first: the
inhabitants say that this whole mountain is full of water, and add, that the whole plain about the
fountain is floating and unsteady, a certain mark that there is water concealed under it; for
which reason, the water does not overflow at the fountain, but forces itself with great violence
out at the foot of the mountain.
Kircher's forte, for better or worse, was that of stitching together, leading him to issue Paez'
"fountains) from Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon

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In 1690, Vincenzo Coronelli was the first to
identify the significance of Lake Tana and
the clockwise unfolding of the Blue Nile.

"The source of the Nile, known as

Ouembroma, Eyes of the Nile."

To the right, Nicolas de Fer's 1705 map showing

"les yeux du Nil" (the eyes of the Nile) based on
Paez.

To the left, "Source of the Nile," Description de l'

Univers (1719) by Alain Mallet.

Exploring the region of Lake Tana in 1770, James Bruce came upon the Springs of Gish,
inauspicious headwaters of the River Abay -- locally the "Felege Ghion," identifying with the
Gihon of Exodus -- which flows into the lake.

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From Bruce's Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile

(1790),
The fountains of the Nile are three... All the three may
be observed to spring, but so imperceptibly that it can
scarcely be discerned by great attention, and it is false
what is said by some that they spring with a noise out of
the ground, rising above it.

The three fountains are

portrayed on the volume's
cover.
The false claim in Latin,
It had not happened that
another had seen the
source.

"Mr. Bruce at the Fountains

of the Nile" (1802)

Bruce's Map 1790

Bruce's description of the sub-lacustrine pathway,

In April... the Nile... forces itself through the stagnant lake without mixing with it. In the
beginning of May, hundreds off streams pour themselves... into the Lake Tana, which had
become low by intense evaporation, but now begins to fill insensibly, and contributes a large
quantity of water to the Nile, before it falls down the cataract.
This brings to mind an earlier quote from Pausanias, "The Nile enters a lake, and passes through
it as though it were dry land."

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

The inhabitants say that this whole mountain is full of water, and add, that the whole plain about
the fountain is floating and unsteady, a certain mark that there is water concealed under it; for
which reason, the water does not overflow at the fountain, but forces itself with great violence
out at the foot of the mountain.
One must wonder if this was what the inhabitants actually said, as the hollow-hill seems strikingly
similar to what Bruce would have read from Kircher.
The West African Connection
Between the Nile and Niger basins, the intervening
Chad Basin is terminal, meaning that its waters
infiltrate or evapotranspirate.
Before the 19th century, speculation ran rampant
regarding which river mouth connected to fabled
reaches deep within the foreboding continent.
While the Nile's south-to-north gradient was long
known, there was scant agreement regarding the
paths of the immense waterways to the west.
Perhaps waters within what we know today to be
the Niger, Chad and Congo basins were portions of
a trans-African waterway.

Niger
Lake Chad
Nile
Congo

A tale told to Herodotus,

Five young men were chosen to explore the deserts of Libya. They reached a district full of
wild beasts, and continuing their route towards the west for a considerable time, through very
sandy country, they reached a plain where there were trees. Having approached them, they
ate some of the fruits of these trees, and while they were so engaged, a body of men, whose
stature was beneath the middle size, fell upon them and carried them off by force. They
conducted them through many districts, and having traversed these, they arrived at a city, all of
the inhabitants of which were black and of the same size as those who had conducted them
thither. A great river, in which there were crocodiles, ran through this city from west to east.
With regard to this river, Etearchus conjectured that it was the Nile, and this seems reasonable,
for the Nile comes from Libya and intersects it through the middle.
The river which Etearchus took to be the Nile was likely the Niger, the two rivers likewise equated
in Arabica by King Juba II of Numidia (c. 51 BC-23 AD), a work well known in Rome.
Herodotus didn't personally believe that the crocodile-infested river was the Nile, however, as he
also notes,
It is certain that the Nile comes from the west, but nothing certain can be ascertained of what is
beyond the country of the Automoles [subjects of the Ethiopian king], four months journey by
land and water from Elephantine.]

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Chapter 14 -- Fountains of the Nile

A trans-African Nile river was now in the books. And
even better, within a saga of young adventures taken
captive by dwarfs to a crocodilian land. It's a tale
worth retelling, and as we'll come to appreciate, retold fancy often trumps dreary fact.
The 1907 Atlas of Ancient and
Classical Geography's rendition
of how Herodotus would have
envisioned Africa.

Mela described a River Nuchul "on the far side of the desert in Ethiopia" in De Situ Orbis Libri III
(c. 43), conjecturing that it may flow as a trans-African waterway
While all others direct their course toward the ocean, this one flows towards the east, and the
center of the continent, and whither it goes is quite uncertain.
Pliny drew upon Juba's Arabica and interviewed Suetonius Paulinus who had crossed the
Western Atlas and desert, arriving at a great river which Pliny deemed to be the Nile, the water
diving underground whenever a tract of sand presented itself and bursting upward in fertile land.
The sources of the Nile are unascertained, and, travelling as it does for an immense distance
through deserts and burning sands, it is only known to us by common report.... It rises, so far
indeed as King Juba was enabled to ascertain, in a mountain of Lower Mauritania, not far from
the ocean; immediately after which it forms a lake of standing water, which bears the name of
Nilides. Pouring forth from this lake, the river disdains to flow through arid and sandy deserts,
and for a distance of several days' journey conceals itself; after which it bursts forth at another
lake of greater magnitude in the country of the Massaesy.
It then buries itself once again in the sands of the desert, and remains concealed for a distance
of twenty days' journey, till it has reached the confines of Ethiopia. Here, when it has once
more become sensible of the presence of man, it again emerges, at the same source, in all
probability, to which writers have given the name of Niger, or Black.
After this, forming the boundary-line between Africa
and Ethiopia, its banks... it travels through the
middle of Ethiopia, under the name of Astapus [the
Atbara, the Nile's most northern tributary], a word
which signifies, in the language of the nations who
dwell in those regions, "water issuing from the
shades below."

The Land of Shades was said to be located at the border of our world and home to dwarfs,
monsters and spirits. Beyond this lay a sea sprinkled with mysterious islands and enchanted
archipelagoes inhabited by serpents with human voices, sometimes friendly and sometimes cruel
to the shipwrecked. He who ventured forth from the islands could never return. The parallels to
Greek sagas are inescapable.

DRAFT

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