Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 7 -- The Concept of Circulation
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.
From 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 inclosed 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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