Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 8 -- Transmuational and Biologic Engines
CHAPTER 8
TRANSMUTATIONAL AND BIOLOGICAL 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
rivers do not issue from the sea -- at least all do not make their exit directly out of the ocean into
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