Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Terrestrial Arteries
Chapter 8 -- Transmuational and Biologic Engines
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 Vinci’s 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, Galen’s
model of the heart -- pumping ever upward as it
must -- made sense.
Springs
Ocean
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William Caxton (1422-1491), the first English
printer, subscribed to the blood model in Mirror
of the World, though the actual authorship
remains unknown.
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,
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.
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