Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 8 -- Transmuational and Biologic Engines
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 Seville’s 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 (1363-
1382) 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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