Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines
Da Vinci suggests how seawater can rise toward a mountain peak because of subterranean fire.
The heat of the spirit of the world is the fire which pervades the earth, and the seat of the
vegetative soul is in the fires, which in many parts of the earth find vent in baths and mines of
sulphur, and in volcanoes, as at Mount Aetna in Sicily, and in many other places.
Georg Bauer (1494-1555), "Agricola," recognized in
De Ortu et Causis Subterraneum (1546) that springs
are largely supplied by rainwater, but,
Being heated it can continually give off halitus
[steam], from which arises a great and abundant
force of waters. Halitus rises to the upper parts of
the canales, where the congealing cold turns it
into water, which by its gravity and weight again
runs down to the lowest parts and increases the
flow of water if there is any.
If any find its way through a canales dilatata [expanded] the same thing happens, but it is
carried a long way from its place of origin. The first phase of distillation teaches us how this
water is produced, for when that which is put into the ampulla is warmed it evaporates, and this
balitus rising into the operculum is converted by cold into water, which drips through the spout.
In this way water is being continually created underground.
And so we know from all this that of the waters which are under the earth, some are collected
from rain, some arise from balitus, some from river-water, some from seawater; and we know
that the halitus is produced within the earth partly from rainwater, partly from river water, and
partly from seawater.
In Meteorologicorum Libri VI (1627) Belgian
Libert Froidmont (1587-1653) described
mountains as alembics, a distillation
apparatus familiar to alchemists.
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In his Architettura d'Acque (1656), Giovanni
Battista Barattieri endorsed the geological
alembic, although he included melting snow’s
contribution to springflow based on observation.
On a visit to southern Italy, Kircher -- who surely knew of the igneous demise of Pliny the
Younger (Chapter 3) -- was lowered into the crater of Mt. Vesuvius, then on the brink of eruption,
to examine its interior. More fortunate than Pliny, the Jesuit emerged alive.
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