Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Johann Joachim Becher's theory, put
forth in Physica Subterranea (1669),
placed the evaporation in a single
cavity at the globe's center, the
Abyss, not in individual caverns
beneath mountains. Condensation,
on the other hand, mostly occurs
inside mountains because hills are
more cavernous than the rest of the
earth.
Chapter 9 -- Thermodynamic Engines
The first occasion on which the condensation theory can be
traced to actual observation in a cave was when Nicolas Steno
(1638-1686) wrote in Canis Carchariae (1669)
I have seen an abundance of water dropping from many
caverns where every part of both roof and floor was solid.
The water could not have come through the rock but must have
"condensed from the upper atmosphere ... which I believe is
very common."
Apart from their comparisons of rainfall and streamflow, Perrault and Mariotte (Chapter 12,
Superterranean Metrics) discussed how springs could maintain a reasonably-constant rate.
Perrault, perhaps influenced by Steno, argued the case for subterranean condensation in De
l’Origine des Fontaines (1674).
It is reasonable to believe therefore that in the earth evaporation takes place which can
produce water, either through heat communicated by the Sun ... or by cold or by currents of air
within the earth, The water which occurs in caverns and channels at the foot of mountains is
thus raised inside them to their summits where, because of the numbing induced by the cold
which it encounters, is reduced to little drops of water, which join with each other" and so
appear as springs.
In The Motion of Water and Other Fluids ... Being a Treatise of Hydrostaticks (1718), Mariotte
dismissed the capacity of condensation, and in any case "it is deny'd that there are many such
hollow places in mountains," a refutation of the entire hydrophylacia concept.
The alembic theory of mountain springs faded, but as will be noted in Chapter 45, Subterranean
Geophysics, the fiery-earth model is part-and-parcel of modern geophysics.
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