Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

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? IChapters 8-
10 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.
1. Mechanisms such as wind, capillary action wave or action can draw large quantities of water
from the earth’s interior.
2. Sea water can lose its salt by infiltrating through soil.
3. Rainfall is insufficient to account for all water discharged by rivers.
4. Rainfall can not infiltrate into the ground in large quantities.
5. 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
Moralisée, Codex Vindobonensis
(c. 1250)
William Blake, God as an
Architect (1794)
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William Blake, Newton (1795)
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