The hydrologic cycle and the wisdom of God: A theme in geoteleology

THE I-IYDROLOGIC CYCLE AND THE WISDOM OF GOD A Theme in Geoteleology BY YI-FU TUAN

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The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God A THEME IN GEOTELEOLOGY By YI-FU TUAN

Published for the University of Toronto Department of Geography by the University of Toronto Press

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Le Prieur:

Monsieur, vous regardez sans doute avec un peu de chagrin ces nuages qui s'amassent, & qui nous oteront, selon toutes les apparences, Ie plaisir de la promenade?

Le Chevalier: La vue ne mIen paroit plus affligeante depuis que je connois leur destination. C'est pour remplir nos fontaines & nos rivieres que les vapeurs montent de la mer. J'aime voir tous ces gros nuages partir en diligence pour aller porter Ie rafrafchissement & la fertiliM dans les provinces les plus eloignees. C'est tres-reellement une commission dont ils acquittent. Abbe de Pluche, Le Spectacle de la Nature, 1733

a

The central concept of the science of hydrology is the socalled hydrologic cycle-the circulation of water from the oceans through the atmosphere to the land, and thence by runoff overland or by infiltration and underground movement back to the sea, or alternatively back to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration. H. E. Thomas and L. B. Leopold, Science, 1964

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PREFACE This work is published in the hope that it will contribute to the conversation of scholars with similar interests. The work must stand on its own merit; a preface that is also a muted apology should not be necessary. However, "the hydrologic cycle and the wisdom of God" is perhaps an unusual theme to be taken up by a geographer. It may therefore be helpful to my geographical readers to know how I have strayed into this channel of research. The present study has two roots: one is my interest in historical attitudes towards dry lands, and the other is a concern for the unity of the several branches of physical geography. We do not have to probe deeply into the history of geographical ideas before we become aware of the very late recognition of the extent of dry lands and of aridity as a climatic fact. There are probably various reasons for this conceptual neglect of a distinctive and fairly accessible environment. One is the dominance in Western thought of the Greek conception of climatic zones; these are astronomically derived and explain temperature rather than precipitation contrasts. In the extensive literature on climatic determinism, for example, we frequently find comparisons of human manners and institutions between cold countries in the north and warm countries in the south; but seldom between wet coasts and dry interiors until the nineteenth century. Another reason for the neglect of the great deserts is, as I hope to show, the dominance in Western thought of the idea of Providence. A provident God will see to it that the finished earth is green with grass and forests; from the Hexameron of St. Basil to the Seasons of James Thomson one encounters evidence of this faith in a green earth. God provides for the earth's fertility by making the oceans so large that they supply sufficient moisture to water the land. He also makes mountains so that surplus water can flow off as rivers to irrigate the land, and in addition bring to it new layers of fertile silt. We have here the major elements of the hydrologic cycle-a concept that has been found to be eminently serviceable in explaining the vii

harmonies of nature and the wisdom of nature's God. The other root is my interest in seeing whether there exists an over-arching concept under which most of the processes studied in physical geography can find a place. I was not looking for a static scheme but a dynamic concept, to use a shopworn but unavoidable expression; and I found it-as had several other geographers-in the idea of the hydrologic cycle. While digging into the history of this idea I was surprised by its rich ramifications, and delighted to see how it had extended into fields of learning that now no longer overlap or even share a common border. A few names taken at random from the modern period will show something of the range of talents who, in their differing capacities, have enriched the flavour (though not necessarily the scientific validity) of the concept: Edmund Halley, Andrew Marvell, John Ray, Oliver Goldsmith, James Hutton, Goethe. It hardly needs saying that from the standpoint of specialized research in physical geography a governing concept, such as the hydrologic cycle, is not essential. Not only the expert on soils but even the practising hydrologist can afford to ignore generalized statements concerning the hydrologic cycle, and a fortiori the philosophical, theological, and literary roots of that concept. But if the scientific investigator were to wish occasionally for a broader concourse or an intellectual satisfaction that derives more from the sweep of the view than from the sharpness of the focus, he will find it in the history of his own field-and not least in the history of the hydrologic cycle as it relates to the harmony of nature and the wisdom of God. I hope this monograph will interest two kinds of readers: the physical geographer in mufti, and, more importantly, the student of attitudes towards our natural environment. Acknowledgements: The substance of this study rests on my reading of the printed original texts; but in my forays into intellectual history that is marginal to the central theme, I have gladly raided the works of other scholars for bibliographic guidance and ideas. It seems to me lacking in courtesy to relegate my indebtedness to the more important of my secondary sources entirely to the undignified position of the footnote. I therefore take the liberty of bringing the following works, to which lowe the most debt, to the front: R. J. Chorley, A. J. Dunn, R. P. Beckinsale, The History of the Study of Landforms, Wiley, 1964; C. J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, viii

University of California Press, 1967; S. K. Heninger, Jr., A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, Duke University Press, 1960; M. H. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Norton Library, 1963; and The Breaking of the Circle, Columbia University Press, 1962; E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, Chatto & Windus, 1960; J. K. Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades, Dover, 1965. An early draft of this essay was written while I was enjoying the hospitality of Dr. and Mrs. R. P. Beckinsale at Oxford. Dr. Beckinsale was kind enough to read the draft and make many helpful suggestions; he is of course in no way responsible for the defects of the present, expanded version. Figures 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 are reproduced by kind permission of the Curators of the Bodleian Library.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

vii

ILLUSTRATIONS

xiii

INTRODUCTION

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I The Hydrologic Cycle and John Ray II Trails and Intimations

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19

III The Hydrologic Cycle: Burnet to Guyot

POSTSCRIPT

86

149

BIBLIOGRAPHY

151

xi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1.

The hydrologic cycle.

5

2.

Portrait of John Ray in The Wisdom of God.

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3. Drainage of south-east Kent as symbolized by a half-kneeling man, from a manuscript map in the Ankographia by Christopher Packe. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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Thomas Robinson's conception of the sub- and superterranean circulations of water in New Observations on the Natural Histor;y of the World of Matter (1696).

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"And there is nothing new under the Sunne. " "The Argument of the Front and of the Worke, " from An Apologie by George Hakewill.

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Diagrams illustrating various conceptions of the hydrologic cycle. Top: Medieval and Renaissance; Centre: John Ray; Bottom: Modern.

51

Portrait of Thomas Burnet in Sacred Theor;y of the Earth (1684).

87

The hydrologic cycle according to Thomas Burnet.

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Top: The hydro-geologic cycle according to John Playfair. Bottom: The hydrologic cycle represented in a circular diagram.

xiii

131

THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE AND THE WISDOM OF GOD:

A THEME IN GEOTELEOLOGY

INTRODUC TION

In the earth sciences there are relatively few fundamental concepts that are capable of subsuming under them a vast number of seemingly little related facts. One such concept is the hydrologic cycle. In its simplest form it describes the circulation of water as it evaporates from the oceans, enters the atmosphere, is precipitated to the earth, and the part that falls back to land ultimately returns to the oceans by surface and underground channels. In almost any textbook on physical geography and hydrology-and in some technical papers too-we may expect to find some such statement, supplemented by a few statistics and perhaps also a very simple diagram. It is increasingly realized that the movements of water in the earth's crust, on its surface and in the air, are exceedingly complex. They vary greatly both in the length of the path travelled and in the time taken. A very short cycle may complete itself without touching the earth's surface; changes of aqueous state may occur repeatedly in the air. Another type of a very short cycle is mere evaporation from the sea and immediate return to it. The cycle most frequently discussed under the heading of water circulation is the familiar scheme in which water proceeds from the ocean to the land in the form of vapour, condenses and precipitates over the land, and is returned to the ocean by rivers. This we may call the "standard" cycle. If the water is eventually returned to its oceanic source via the slow carrier of moving ice then we may call it a long cycle. But there exists a still longer cycle in the extremely slow course of connate water. In length of time, then, the cycle may be completed in a few seconds or it may take a few millennia, and indeed, much, much longer. What sense, we may wonder, is there in grouping such vastly dissimilar processes under the heading of the hydrologic cycle? We can justify a family relationship, perhaps, by saying (with P. H. Kuenen) 1 that, in whatever sequence the events occur 1p. H. Kuenen, Realms of Water: Some Aspects of Its Cycle in Nature (New York: John Wiley, 1955), pp, 11-12, 3

and however varied the pattern may be, again and again we come up against the same ineluctable principle of cycle. And that no matter whether this cycle takes a short or long time to complete, whether it be complicated or simple, the outcome is always the same: water returns to its point of departure, the ocean (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, hydrologists are feeling less and less happy with the concept. As commonly stated and illustrated it appears so loose and generalized as to be almost meaningless. Certainly it is of little applied use. In modern works on physical geography and hydrology the theme of the hydrologic cycle is presented briefly almost as a matter of habit, a routine affirmation of the ''unity of things" that has little bearing on the subsequent, detailed analyses of specific hydrologic processes. It may also appear curious that only one of the cycles-the one I have called "standard "-should receive the most persistent attention. One purpose of this essay is to show that, for at least one hundred and fifty years (ca. 1700-1850), the concept of the hydrologic cycle in the "standard" form was a handmaiden of natural theology as much as it was a child of natural philosophy. It is not to be presumed, however, that theologians merely took over and simplified a concept of science and used it for their own didactic purposes. In the nineteenth century this may have been true, but towards the end of the seventeenth century and in the beginning of the eighteenth such a description of the development of the concept would have been misleading. Not only was there no sharp distinction then between natural theology and science but scholars who wrote on the theme of the water cycle within the context of a physico-theological treatise actually contributed to it. The contribution lay largely in extending the number of physical processes and facts that can be subsumed in a unified scheme. For it was this unity-the beautiful economy of means and ends-that illustrated the wisdom of God. The eighteenth century was a period of faith in reason. Superstitions inherited from the Middle Ages already seemed curious relics of a distant past. While the New Science added nothing to Trinitarian theology it gave a new lease of life to natural theology, which sought for the attributes of the Creator-God in the heavens, on earth and on earth's inhabitants. Of the three classes of evidence-astronomical, terrestrial and biologicalterrestrial evidence proved in some ways to be the most difficult to draw upon in support of the notion of a wise and provident 4

....

SHORT

Fig. 1.

CYCLE

The Hydrologic Cycle.

LON

(Reproduced from Kuenen, Realm

God. Until the concept of the hydrologic cycle was introduced and elaborated, it was difficult to argue convincingly for rationality in the pattern of land and sea, in the existence of mountains, in the occurrence of floods, etc. The hydrologic cycle served as an ordering principle, and when combined with the geologic cycle, it assumed a grandeur of inclusiveness that makes some of our modern efforts to describe the earth look like a medley of disjointed facts and ideas. It therefore seems to me worthwhile to attempt to trace the origins, the development, and the eventual enfeeblement of the concept of the water cycle. For in its finer expressions the concept does honour to the ingenuity of the human mind if not indeed to the wisdom of God.

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CHAPTER I

THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE AND JOHN RAY

In contrast to the abbreviated discussion of the hydrologic cycle in modern textbooks on physical geography, and even in some technical papers, we may turn to the understanding of the concept at the opening of the eighteenth century as expressed by John Ray (1627-1705), an English naturalist whom one modern biographer has described as a man of "outstanding genius. ,,1 My reason for selecting Ray to introduce the theme of this essay is not that he has made the most original contribution to the idea of the hydrologic cycle. Indeed it is not rewarding to decide on degrees of originality when we are concerned with a concept the roots of which are multiple, deep, and entangled. But Ray's exposition may be usefully taken up at this point for the following reasons: (a) It is remarkably full. (b) It illustrates how teleological thinking may lead to certain kinds of scientific insight. This need not surprise us, for to emphasize wisdom in God's work (as Ray did) was to emphasize the relatedness of the parts to one another and to the whole. Facts need not be naively accepted. The relationships among them were all important. Some of the relationships that Ray held have since been proved wrong but in the main they attested to his prescience. (c) Ray's arguments for the wisdom of God from the facts of physical geography assumed a pattern which influenced the thinking of successive generations of writers until well into the nineteenth century. His work, The Wisdom of God, was greatly esteemed and very popular. First published in 1691 it saw twelve editions by 1759, and the latest was issued as recently as 1827. William Paley's Natural Theology (1802), for example, was another popular book; it reached a twentieth edition before its twentieth year and was last reprinted in 1879. But, of Paley's work we 1C. E. Raven, John Ray, Naturalist, His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. x. 7

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may say that it essentially paraphrased John Ray's masterpiece. Ray at first had little use for the facts of physical geography as evidence of God's wisdom. The notion of the hydrologic cycle, which, after all, had already been in existence for some time, did not appear in the first two editions of The Wisdom of God (1691, 1692). In these editions individual parts of the earth were praised for their intrinsic beauty and for their usefulness to man. Thus on the sea, Ray had this to say: The Sea, what infinite Variety of Fishes doth it nourish! 0 . . How doth it exactly compose itself to a Level, or equal Supercies, and in the Earth make up one Spherical Roundness? How doth it constantly observe its Ebbs and Flows, its Spring and Nepe-tides, and still retains its Saltness, so convenient for the Maintenance of its Inhabitants, serving also the Uses of Man for Navigation, and the Convenience of Carriage?2 Another merit, Ray added, is that the sea does not overflow and stand above the land as it would have been natural for the sea to do. A principle of Aristotelian physics was providentially suspended.

Why So Much Water? This was all very well but, Why so much water? How does one reconcile the vastness of the seas (most of it useless to man) with a provident God? By modern convention any question preceded by "why" or "what need" rules itself out as a scientifically proper inquiry. Ray and his philosophical contemporaries could not know. And we shall see how the attempt to answer this seemingly idle question led to the eventual establishment of a whole, hitherto little noted, pattern of relationships in physical geography. In Ray's words, then, the question was: But what Need was there (may some say) that the Sea should be made so large, that its Superficies should equal, if not exceed, that of the dry land? Where is the Wisdom of the Creator in making so much useless sea, and so little dry land, which 2John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (2nd edition; London, 1692), p. 720 9

would have been far more beneficial and serviceable to Mankind? Might not at least half the Sea have been spar'd and added to the Land, for the Entertainment and Maintenance of Men, who by the continual Striving and Fighting to enlarge their Bounds and encroaching upon one another, seem to be straitened for Want of Room ?3 Men needed more space. The third edition of The Wisdom of God was published in 1701. By then the idea that population increases would exert pressure on the limited resources of the earth had already been in the air for at least a century and a half. Ray appears to have picked up the idea to give urgency to his question. He did not, however, provide an answer himself: it came instead from two younger contemporaries, the brilliant classicist Richard Bentley (1662-1742) and the mathematician John Keill (1671-1721). They reached the same conclusion. Bentley's preceded Keill's in publication by five years but it left no echo. Keill's answer, given in his meticulous Examination of Dr. Burnet's Theory of the Earth (1698), was vigorously taken up by Ray. In the third edition of The Wisdom of God, Ray gave Keill's answer in his own words and italicized them for emphasis. This, as most other of the Atheists Arguments, proceeds from a deep Ignorance of Natural Phil os ophy; for if there were but half the Sea that now is, there would be also but half the Quantity of Vapours, and consequently we could have but half so many Rivers as now there are to supply all the dry land we have at present, and half as much more; for the quantity of Vapours which are rais'd, bears a Proportion to the Surface whence they are rais'd, as well as to the Heat which rais'd them. The Wise Creator therefore did so prudently order it, that the Sea should be large enough to supply Vapours sufficient for all the Land, which it would not do if it were less than now it is [po 88]. The main elements of the hydrologic cycle are discernible in this paragraph: evaporation from the sea, the amount of vapour raised being proportional to the size of the evaporating 3Ibid.

(3rd edition, 1701), p. 87, 10

surface; the transportation of the vapour to the land, its condensation over it to produce rivers. The number of rivers available to water the land, in other words, depends on the size of the sea. The segment of the cycle that is not explicitly given is that the rivers eventually return the water to the sea, thus maintaining its level. Keill's statement might have remained a solitary insight, like Bentley's, but for the fact that it received Ray's patronage. Enclosure in The Wisdom of God ensured it a long life and a wide audience. Ray, moreover, extended Keill's argument. He raised hypothetical objections to it and in the process of demolishing the objections he sharpened and further enriched the whole concept of the hydrologic cycle,

The Problem of Vapour Exchange Having given Keill's answer to the apparent disproportion between sea and land, Ray pursued the problem by asking: But against this it may be objected, Why should not all the Vapours which are rais'd out of the Sea fall down again into it by Rain? Is there not as much Reason that the Vapours which are exhaled out of the Earth should be carried down to the Sea, as that those raised out of the Sea be brought up upon the dry Land? If some by Winds be driven from the Sea up Land, others by the same Cause will be blown down from Land to Sea, and so balancing one another, they will in Sum fall equally upon Sea and Land; and consequently the Sea contribute nothing to the Watering of the Earth, or the Maintenance of Rivers. 4 Ray's answer was again prescient in broad conception though incorrect in detail. Ray appears to have believed that insofar as it is a question of watering the earth by rain there need be no supply of vapour from the sea. Sufficient vapour was "exhaled out of" the land to do that. Without additional water from the sea, as Ray saw it, precipitation and evaporation would have been in balance over land, there being "no more return'd upon it by Rain, so as to rest upon it, than an 4Ibid,

(8th edition, 1722), p. 80. 11

equivalent Quantity to what was rais'd out of it" (p. 81). This, of course, is incorrect. Areas cut off to any extent from oceanic sources of moisture are quite dry. But even if there were a state of approximate balance between precipitation and evaporation the land would have been at best subhumid, of uncertain productivity. The water available would barely have sufficed to serve "for the Nutrition of Plants and Animals. " But, to pursue Ray's train of thought, his answer to his own question was that though fl • • • as to the Watering of the Earth there needs be no Supply from the Sea, " the rivers must be supplied in other ways. The rivers are fed by "Rain and Vapours" and the question is, "Whence these Vapours are brought? We answer, From the Sea. But what brings them up from the Sea? I answer, The Winds" (Fig. 6, centre). By giving this answer, however, Ray realized that he had returned to the original difficulty, namely: "Why should not the Winds carry them that are exhaled out of the Earth down to the Sea, as well as Bring them up upon the Earth, which are rais'd from the Sea? Or, which is all one, why should not the Wind blow indifferently from Sea and Land?" Ray professed ignorance and asserted as a simple matter of fact, "That the Winds do bring abundantly more Vapours up from the Sea than they carry down thither" (p. 81). He offered two proofs. "First, Because otherwise there can be no Account given of Floods." The excess of water on land argues for a predOminant transportation of vapours from sea to land. It is clear, That Floods with us proceed from Rain; and it is often a vast Quantity of Water they carry down to the Sea. Whence come those Vapours which supply all this Water, I hope those who bring up Springs and Rivers from the great Abyss, will not bring those Vapours, which unite into Drops, and descend in Rain from thence too. Should they rise from the dry land only, they would soon render it dry indeed; more parch'd than the Desarts of Libya [po 82).

The second proof is more direct. "That the Winds bring up more Vapours from the Sea than they carry down thither, is, Because the Winds do more frequently blow from the Sea than to the Sea." The evidence presented has a modern ring: it is 12

in the deformation of coastal vegetation. "Trees which grow on and near the Sea-shores all along the Western Coast of England [have] Heads and Boughs [that run] far to Landward; but toward the Sea [they are] so snub'd by the Winds, as if their Boughs and Leaves had been pared or shaven off on that Side" (pp. 83-84).

Mountains, Rain and Flood In Ray's view, then, rivers are fed by the "Surplusage of Water after the Earth is sated with Rain" (p. 82). The surplus itself is possible because of the vast amount of vapour that the winds bring into the land from the sea. Ray contended that rivers and springs are fed by "distil'd" vapour or rain, and not through the ''breaking up [of] the Fountains of the great Deep, " nor through the direct condensation of vapours on the sides of mountains, a notion Ray attributed to Edmund Halley. 5 The efficacy of rains to produce flood is borne out by personal observation. I myself have observed a Thunder-Cloud in passage, to have in less than two hours space poured down so much Water upon the Earth, as besides what sunk into the parched and thirsty ground, and filled all Ditches and Ponds, caused a considerable Flood in the Rivers, setting all the Meadows on note. . . . Now it is to be considered, that not only the Air above the Dry Land, but also all that covers the whole Ocean, is charged with Vapours, which are nothing else but diffused Water: all which was brought together by Winds . . . and caused to distil down in Rain upon the Earth. 6 The wisdom of God is by now amply demonstrated in the apportionments of physical geography. The problem raised by the inordinate size of the oceans has been disposed of. There remained a few other questions which Ray answered with confidence. One was the unsightliness and uselessness of mountains. A critic like Thomas Burnet, for instance (although 5Ibid., p. 82. Also, Ray, Miscellaneous Discourses, Concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World (London, 1692), p. 67; criticism of Halley, p. 82. 6Ibid., p. 69.

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"

"

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Ray did not specify him by name), might say "That the present Earth looks like a Heap of Rubbish and Ruins; and That there are no greater Examples of Confusion in Nature, than Mountains singly or jointly considered . . . . " In answer Rayasserted that the " . . . great use and necessity of Mountains and Hills is for the Generation and Maintenance of Rivers and Fountains which (in our Hypothesis, that all proceed from RainWater) could not be without them, or but rarely. ,,7 He quoted in approval Edmund Halley's suggestion that the end and use of mountains was that "their Ridges being placed through the midst of the Continents, might serve as it were Alembicks to distil fresh Water for the use of Man and Beast." But Ray objected to Halley's hesitation in admitting "Final Causes" in the origin of mountains. "What needs this hesitancy and dubitation in a thing that is clear ?,,8 Another question was: "To what Purpose serve the Floods?" The answer that Ray gave completed the hydrologic cycle. It was, "To return back to the Sea the Surplusage of Water after the Earth is sated with Rain." But this did not really answer the question of purpose. Ray continued, "It must be further ask'd, What need more Rain be poured upon the Earth than is sufficient to water it? I reply, That the Rain brings down from the Mountains and higher Grounds a great Quantity of Earth, and in Times of Floods spreads it upon the Meadows and Levels, rendering them thereby so fruitful as to stand in need of no Culture, or Manuring." The theme of erosion and deposition is thus insinuated into a segment of the hydrologic cycle. 9

Green Grass and other Herbs Step by step Ray built up his case for the wisdom of God as exemplified in physical geography. The earth exhaled sufficient vapour so that upon its distillation the water would be adequate to the needs of the land. The rivers and floods, fed by distilled vapours from the great seas, were also necessary for they brought down from the mountains fertile soil with which to 7Ibid., p. 168; also Ray, Three Physico-Theological Discourses (London, 1721), p. 34. 8Ibid., p. 253. 9 Ray , The Wisdom of God .

(1722), p. 82. 14

fertilize the meadows and levels. However, in his enthusias m Ray had greatly overdrawn the extent of the well-watered and fertile earth. It was characteristic of those who followed the same train of thought as Ray-the train of thought guided by the hydrologic cycle-to neglect the deserts. An unreal image of the fertile earth, necessary to one's conception of God's providence, persisted until well into the nineteenth century. The following rhapsodic statements illustrate Ray's too-generous view of the earth's fertility: The great Use and Convenience, the Beauty and Variety of so many Springs and Fountains; so many Brooks and Rivers, so many Lakes and standing Pools of Water, and these so scatter'd and dispers'd all the Earth over, that no Part of it is destitute of them, without which it must, without a Supply otherways, be desolate and void of Inhabitants' afford abundant Arguments of Wisdom and Council. 10 And here is a description of the "whole dry land" but it appears nevertheless to be largely inspired by England and is strictly applicable perhaps only to Eden: Add to all this, that the whole dry Land is, for the most Part cover'd over with a lovely Carpet of green Grass, and other Herbs, of a Colour not only most grateful and agreeable, but most useful and salutary to the Eye; and this also deck'd and adorn'd with great Variety of Flowers of beautiful Colours and Figures, and most pleasant and fragrant Odours, for the Refreshment of our Spirits and our innocent Delight; as also with beautiful Shrubs and stately Trees, affording as not only pleasant and nourishing Fruits, many LIquors, Drugs, and good Medicines, but Timber, and Utensils for all Sorts of Trades and the Convenience of Man; out of many Thousands of which we will only name a few, lest we should be tedious and too bulky [po 207J.

10Ibid. (1692), pp. 74-75; (1722), p. 86. 15

Erosion and Deposition In trying to explain the purpose of floods, John Ray noted that they carry material from the mountains and deposit them on the plains. Their work is that of erosion, transportation, and deposition. The movement of water from the mountains across the plains to the sea is a segment of the hydrologic cycle. Historically, however, this segment of the cycle has not been closely associated with the work performed by moving water. The effects of moving water on the land usually receive separate treatment as events in a denudational chronology. Ray did, as we have noted, introduce the idea of erosion and deposition into the conceptual scheme of the water cycle. But his more explicit comments on denudation and deposition occur in the context of another intellectual problem of his time. This was not the problem of relating the present geographical pattern of land and water to the wisdom of God; it was rather the question of the future and final state of the world. The earth, in spite of its beauty and utility, is not eternal. It is not man's final home. Scripture guarantees its ultimate dissolution. Do present processes working on the earth's surface offer any clue as to its final state? Ray contemplated "the possibility of the Waters again naturally overflowing and covering the Earth. ,,11 It seemed possible. "For, First of all, The Rains continually washing down and carrying away Earth from the Mountains, it is necessary, that as well the height as the bulk of them should answerably decrease; and that they do so, is evident in Experience." The hills will continue to "sink" so "long as there falls any Rains, and as they retain any declivity, that is, till they be levelled with the Plains" (p. 44). Ray then proceeded to describe the concomitant process of deposition. "By reason of the abundance of Earth thus washed off the Mountains by Shots of Rain, and carried down with the floods to the sea; about the outlets of the Rivers, where the violent Motion of the Water ceases, settling to the bottom, and raising it by degrees above the Surface of the Water, the Land continually gains upon, and drives back the Sea" (p. 45). Elsewhere, the aggradation of the lower valleys and the smoothing of the coastline are described in these words:

11 Ray , Miscellaneous Discourses, . . . , p. 39.

16

Now the Rain thus continually washing away, and carrying down Earth from the Mountains and higher Grounds, and raising up the Vallies near the Sea, as long as there is any descent for the Rivers, so long will they continue to run, carry forward the low ground, and streighten the Sea, which also by its working, by reason of the declivity, easily carries down the Earth towards the lower and middle parts of its Channel . . . and by degrees may fill it up [pp. 47-48J. Deposition at the mouths of rivers results in the gaining of the land upon the sea. Ray also considered the opposite possibility: that the sea might devour the land through the slow process of wave action. He was doubtful, however, of its success: wave action is too slow and the mass of land to be consumed too large. But this according to the leisurely proceedings of Nature, would not c-ome to pass in many Ages, I might say, in Ages of Ages: Nay, some think, that those vast Ridges and Chains of Mountains, which run through the middle of the Continents, are by reason of their great height, weight and solidity, too great a Morsel ever to be devoured by the Jaws of the Sea. In any case, it was not a dispute Ray cared to participate in 'fbecause this is not the dissolution the Apostle here speaks of, which must be by Fire 11 (p. 50). These ideas, the dissolution of land mass by rain and water on the one hand and marine erosion on the other, had been anticipated by George Hakewill and Bernhard Varenius among Ray's immediate predecessors. Ray added one or two original touches of detail, including the modern notion. of physical weathering exerted by the pressure of roots. What force a gentle, if continual pressure hath, we may understand also by the Roots of Trees, which we see will sometimes pierce through the Chinks of Stone Walls, and in time make great Cracks and Rifts in them; nay, will get under their very foundations [po 53]. Ray cannot be said to have anticipated the geologic cycle in spite of his keen comments on weathering, erosion, and depositiono 17

For the word "cycle" to have any meaning the demolished mountains must be seen as somehow capable of resuscitation. Alluvial plains, the product of destroyed mountains, must be susceptible to renewed uplift. The possibility of vertical crustal movements of large order was, however, implicitly acknowledged by Ray. He encountered it not in the context of the "Dissolution of the World" but in the problem of accounting for sea shells on high mountain tops. Ray believed that such highly elevated shell beds were once below sea-level, that the shells at the sea bottom were successively covered by "Several Coats, or Floors of Earth, brought down from the Mountains in Land-Floods; the several Beds or Floors to be seen in such broken Mountains, being the several Settlings of particular Floods. ,,12 Ray's primary interest was in botany. His interest in the earth's physical patterns and history was tertiary. It is all the more remarkable that his observations on the earth were so keen. His "solution" to the problem of the distribution of land and water was the hydrologic cycle, to the problem of the earth's dissolution the possible development of a level surface, and to the problem of elevated shell beds the occurrence of large vertical displacement. It is true that Ray did not link these separate problems together and thus missed the opportunity of offering a grand intellectual scheme-a complex hydro-geologic cycleunder which the disparate facts of the earth may be seen to bear unexpected relationships with one another. That must be left to his successors. Indeed, a satisfactory synthesis is yet to be achieved.

12Ray , Philosophical Let ters, Between the late Learned Mr. Ray and several of his Ingenious Correspondents, Natives and Foreigners (London 1718), p. 166. 18

CHAPTER II

TRAILS AND INTIMATIONS

Ray's exposition of geoteleology, using the concept of the hydrologic cycle and the dissolution of the world, lent a unity to the multiple facets of physical geography that few modern scientific expositors can (or perhaps wish to) match. We may now turn to some of the earlier views and controversies that have prepared the way-by no means a smooth and straight one-to Ray's fulsome treatment at the opening of the eighteenth century. The complex strains in Ray's physical and geoteleological conception may be disentangled and shown to include at least the following: (1) the size of the sea, (2) the circular motion of air, vapour, and water, (3) the fertility of the earth, and (4) importantly (supplying, as it were, the underlying motive), the providence and wisdom of God.

The Size of the Sea The starting point of Ray's teleological geology was the difficulty of reconciling the size of the sea, essentially of little service to man, to the wisdom of God. In the Middle Ages, in contrast, a more pressing problem was why the water, a purer substance than land in the hierarchy of fire, air, water, and land, did not cover the whole earth. One answer was that it simply expressed the arbitrary working of God's will. Commentators on the Psalms were nevertheless uneasy with the arbitrary fiat by which God established the earth above the waters. There existed also in the Middle Ages a continental theory of physical geography. This was the belief that the oceans of the earth occupied relatively small and enclosed basins. The continental theory had the support of such popular figures as Martianus Capella and Macrobius, and the high authority of the

19

Second Book of Esdras. 1 Such support prevented the widespread acceptance of the rival, oceanic hypothesis, adumbrated (for instance) by Abelard, that all of the earth's surface except the Oekoumene was covered by water. 2 According to Humboldt, Columbus subscribed to the continental theory. He found it convenient for persuading the Spanish monarch that the oceans were of modest size. The authority of Esdras was, for this purpose, especially useful. 3 The great overseas explorations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to make the continental theory increaSingly untenable, although its persisting influence may be seen in the strongly-held notion of a large southern continent-a notion that survived even the voyages of Captain Cook. Broad stretches of water became an awkward fact when one held to a narrow view of God's providence. As we have noted, Ray in his earlier defence of the sea pointed out that God also provided for the fishes, that the round "Superficies" of water and the regular motion of the tides were manifestations of an order consistent with God's wisdom, and that the sea served "the Uses of Man for Navigation." This last point became very popular in maritime England. But the most widely used argument in defence of the sea was the one presented by John Keill and elaborated by John Ray, namely, that the seas had to be large in order to supply sufficient moisture to fertilize the earth.

IJ. K. Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades (New York: Dover, 1965), pp. 187-188. G. H. T. Kimble, Geography in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen & Co., 1938), pp. 162-163. "On the third day you commanded the waters to be gathered together in the seventh part of the earth, but six parts you dried up and kept them so that some of them might be planted and cultivated and serve before you, " The Second Book of Esdras, 6:42, in The Apocrypha, E. J. Goodspeed translation. 2Wright, p. 188. A Norlind, "Das Problem des gegenseitigen Verhaltnisses von Land und Wasser und seine Behandlung im Mitlelalter, " Lunds Universitets Arsskrift, N. S. (Lund and Leipzig), XIV, No. 12, Part I (1918). 3Alexander von Humboldt, Examen Critique de l'Histoire de la Geographie du Nouveau Continent (Paris, 1836), I, p. 186.

20

The Hydrologic Cycle The development of a concept of water circulation that is in line with divine wisdom required some sort of support from authority. Until well into the nineteenth century the Bible provided the indisputable imprimatur. Its single most influential message, with regard to water circulation, was the verse in Ecclesiastes, "All rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full: Unto the place from which the rivers come thither they return again" (1: 7). Medieval writers on the origin of springs and rivers leaned on its authority. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the verse was repeatedly laced into the hydrological discourse of the physical theologians. Rather surprisingly, it found its way even into the exposition of the great Victorian rationalist Thomas Huxley. His presentation of the hydrologic cycle, given in the second half of the nineteenth century, is worth quoting in some detail for it combines the modern penchant for the particular with the older habit of the sweeping statement, rounded off with a Biblical quotation. Thus, in seeking for the sources of the Thames, we are led from the springs of the earth to the rain of the heavens; and from this to the watery vapour which forms part of the atmosphere; and thence to the great caldron, the ocean, whence the heat of the sun distils that vapour. The great stream of fresh water which flows over Teddington Weir is fed, in large measure, by vapour which has been raised far away on the Atlantic. South and southwest winds sweeping across the ocean become highly charged with watery vapour; and these warm moist winds, striking the Cotteswold Hills, deposit their freight of moisture in showers of rain, much of which reaches the Thames basin. This water is ultimately carried out to sea by the flow of the river, and mingles once more with its present ocean, but only to be removed in due course by further evaporation. The waters of the earth thus moved in a continued cycle, without beginning and without end. From rain to river, from river to sea, from sea to air, and back again from air to earth-such is the circuit in which every drop of water is compelled to circulate . . . . In the words of a wise man of old21

P:U9S

'All the rivers run into the sea: yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, Thether they return again. ,4 The idea that circular motion is characteristic of the nature of things is ancient, and probably of Near Eastern and Indian origin if we trace it back far enough. By the fifth or fourth century B. C. a particular aspect of it-the water cycle-was already known to the Greeks near one end of the Eurasian continent and perhaps to the Chinese at the other. 5 In pre-modern Europe the water cycle in varying degrees of completeness may be extracted from the teachings of Anaximander of Miletus, Anaxagoras, Herodotus, Plato (Critias), Aristotle, Vitruvius, Gregory of Nyssa, Theodoric of Chartres, Peter Alphonsi, William Caxton, Bartholomew Anglicus; and at the threshold of the modern age of science, from Bernard Palissy. Such a list would be much longer if we were to include watercycle theories that later lost currency: for example, the important body of opinion that emphasized the subterranean movement of water from sea to land and so, in a sense, reversed the cycle as we know it today. Although it is possible to compile a list of thinkers who have contributed to the idea of the water cycle and arrange them in chronologic order, we are far from being able to establish a direct line of influence. There are large gaps in historical knowledge. There exist also works of striking independence which appear to owe little to contemporary views and which have had negligible impact on subsequent thought. Bernard Palissy's Discours Admirables (1580), and J. B. 4T . H. Huxley, Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature (3rd edition; London: Macmillan, 1880), pp. 73-74. 5In a Taoist work of the third century B. C., the Lu Shih Chhun Chhui, there is the statement that "The Waters flow eastwards from their sources, resting neither by day nor by night. Down they come inexhaustibly, yet the deeps are never full. The small (streams) become large and the heavy (waters in the sea) become light (and mount to the clouds). This is (part of) the Rotation of the Tao, "J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), III, p. 467.

22

Lamarck's Hydrogeologie (1802) are two examples. Both contain original interpretations on the hydrologic cycle. Palissy's, in particular, was at least a century ahead of his time, 6 A comprehensive history of the concept of the hydrologic cycle has yet to be attempted. Short summaries are available, and the facts need not be repeated here. 7 Our main interest, 6Palissy says that God does not wish to leave anything in idleness. So "rain water that falls in the winter goes up in summer, to come again in winter, and the waters and the action of the sun and dry winds, striking the land, cause great quantities of water to rise: which, being gathered in the air and formed into clouds, have gone in all directions like heralds sent by God. And when the winds rush these vapours the waters fall on all parts of the land, and when it pleased God that these clouds (which are nothing more than a mass of water) should dissolve, these vapours are turned into rain that falls on the ground, " The Admirable Discourses of Bernard Palissy, translated by Aurele la Rocque (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957), p. 53. Lamarck's Hydrogeologie, a much neglected work, was published at his own expense in 1802. Unlike others, Lamarck wondered how the sea was able to maintain its size despite the large volume of sediments (not water) that was dumped into it by rivers; J. B. Lamarck, Hydrogeology, translated by A. V. Carozzi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), pp. 34, 39-40. 7The history of the concept of the hydrologic cycle is often treated implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) in connection with the origin of springs and rivers, and the nature of ground water. See, for example, F. D. Adams, "The Origin of Springs and Rivers, "Chapt. 12 in The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences (New York: Dover, 1954); O. E. Meinzer, "The History and Development of Ground-water Hydrology, " Journ. , Washington Academy of Science, XXIV (1934), 6-32; M. N. Baker and R. E. Horton, "Historical Development of Ideas Regarding the Origin of Springs and Ground Water, " Trans. , Amer. Geophys. Union, Part IT (1936), 395-400. On the hydrologic cycle itself, two recent articles are, R. R. Parizek, "Development of the Hydrologic Cycle Concept and our Challenge in the 20th Century, " Mineral Industries, XXXII (1963), 1-8 and A. K. Biswas, "The Hydrologic Cycle, " Civil Engineering, XXXV (1965), 70-74. 23

.=

moreover, is in relating the cycle to a special conception of God's providence. John Ray's writings exemplified this attitude; and other views, similarly framed in theological doctrine and extending in time from George Hakewill in the seventeenth century to three Bridgwater lecturers during the nineteenth century, will be treated in some detail later. To place these views in their context we may usefully examine here some antecedent and parallel approaches. These may be labelled: (a) the "reversed" hydrologic cycle; (b) the hydrologic cycle, cosmic order, and the circle of perfection; and (c) the vertical, one-dimensional cycle. (a) The "reversed" hydrologic cycle. The classical writers who have exerted a powerful influence on the meteorological thinking of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance were Aristotle and Pliny. The Meteorologica was available in Latin before the beginning of the thirteenth century. And the "Roman encyclopedist most widely read in the Renaissance was Pliny. ,,8 The ideas of Aristotle on the origin of springs and rivers, as they have been preserved in the Meteorologica, are somewhat conflicting. In one passage he gave a sketch of a water cycle that is remarkably modern. In another he appears to have looked upon the cool mountains as direct condensers of moisture in the air. The water so condensed was then held by them like water in saturated sponges to be gradually released in springs. In a third idea, the most ambiguously stated of all, he suggested that the mountains "also cool the vapour that rises and condense it back to water. ,,9 The question is, rise from where? If the moisture is supposed to rise from the interior, then we have a hint of the reversed cycle. But the ambiguous passage in the Meteorologica has provoked conflicting interpretations. Pliny the Elder gave Aristotle as his authority. He was, however, not at all reticent in assigning the interior of the earth as the source for water that bursted out in springs on mountain 88. K. Heninger, Jr., A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1960), p. 12. 9Aristotle Meteorologica, Chapt. 1, translated by E. W. Webster in The Works of Aristotle, I ("Great Books of the Western World"; Chicago, London . . . : Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952). 24

ridges. The intention of the Artificer of nature must have been to unite earth and water in a mutual embrace, earth opening her bosom and water penetrating her entire frame by means of a network of veins radiating within and without, above and below, the water bursting out even at the tops of the mountain ridges, to which it is driven and squeezed out by the weight of the earth, and spouts out like a jet of water from a pipe, and is so far from being in danger of falling down that it leaps upward to all the loftiest elevations. This theory shows clearly why the seas do not increase in bulk with the daily accession of so many rivers. The consequence is that the earth at every point of the globe is encircled and engirdled by sea flowing round it, and this does not need theoretical investigation, but has already been ascertained by experience. 10 Pliny may be credited with the most uncompromising statement of the reversed hydrologic cycle. Medieval scholars interested in science probably depended more on Pliny than on Seneca. Nevertheless, Seneca's Quaestiones Naturales served as a major source for meteorological knowledge during the Middle Ages. Even in the late Renaissance his authority was acknowledged, a.s, for example, in William Fulke's important work, A Goodly Gallery (1563). The quaestiones Naturales was an ill-sorted compilation of largely secondhand ideas. On the origin of springs and rivers Seneca considered three opinions that then prevailed. One of them is an explicit encapsulation of the main elements of the reversed hydrologic cycle. The Sea . . . does not get larger, because it does not assimilate the water that runs into it, but forthwith restores it to the earth. For the sea water returns by a secret path, and is filtered in its passage back. Being dashed about as it passes through the endless, winding channels in tlie ground, it loses its 10Pliny Natural History, translated by H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1938), Bk. II, LXV, pp. 301-303. 25

salinity, and, purged of its bitterness in such a variety of ground as it passes through, it eventually changes into pure, fresh water. 11 Seneca did not comment on this opinion. Another, on which he commented favourably, was the idea (following Aristotle) that sluggish air turned into water in the cool dark hollows of the earth. Just as above the earth a change in the density of the atmosphere produced rain so beneath the earth the change of density started a river. The air above ground could not long remain sluggish and heavy for it was subject, from time to time, to rarefaction by the sun's heat or expansion by the force of the wind. But underground the forces that turned air into water were constant-perpetual darkness, cold, and inert density. They could, therefore, supply without a break the sources of fountain or flood. We Stoics are satisfied that the earth is interchangeable in its elements. So all this air that she has exhaled in her interior, since it was not taken up by the free atmosphere, condenses and is forthwith converted into moisture [pp. 119-120]. "There, " he added, "you have the first cause of the origin of underground water. " Seneca rejected rain as the cause of rivers. His authority, along with that of Pliny, might well have contributed to the persistent dissociation of rainwater from the origin of rivers throughout the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. Seneca first pointed out how "Some suppose that all the water that the earth drinks in from rain is sent out again into the rivers "; and how they adduced as evidence for this the fact that countries of infrequent rain have few rivers and vice versa. [But], a great deal can obviously be urged in reply to this. First of all, as a diligent digger among my vines, I can affirm from observation that no rain is ever so heavy as to wet the ground to a depth of more than 10 feet. . . . How, then, can rain, which merely damps the surface, store up a supply sufficient for rivers? [Pp. 117-118 0

]

11John Clarke, Physical Science in the Time of Nero, Being a Translation of the Quaestiones Naturales of Seneca (London, 1910), pp. 116-117. 26

In the Dark Ages scholars showed little concern for the origin of springs and rivers. The influential opinions of ISidore of Seville (A. D. 570-636) were derivative. His encyclopaedia, the Etymologies, reflected the method and content of the Latin encyclopaedias of the Empire, including that of the elder Pliny. Isidore's Etymologies was by far the most comprehensive compendium of secular knowledge for his period. Its enduring impact through the succeeding centuries was attested by the innumerable references to it in the works of later writers, and in its successive editions since the invention of printing. On the theme of rains and clouds, for example, Isidore was paraphrased by Bede and both authors were cited as authorities by the English Franciscan, Bartholomew, in his discussion of m~teors. The Italian "Religioso, " Ristoro d' Arezzo, subscribed to the reversed hydrologic cycle in his comprehensive treatise on nature. One of his sources was probably Isidore of Seville. 12 As to Isidore's opinion on the origin of springs and rivers, the following two passages suggest that he endorsed the concept of the reversed cycle, although not in the authoritative terms of Pliny. Moreover that the sea does not increase, though it receives all streams and all springs, is accounted for in this way; partly that its very greatness does not feel the waters flowing in; secondly, because the bitter water consumes the fresh that is added, or that the clouds draw up much water to themselves, or that the winds carry it off, and the sun partly dries it up; lastly, because the water leaks through certain secret holes in the earth, and turns and runs back to the sources of rivers and to the springs. 13 A rather muddy statement on subsurface water circulation appears in the chapter, "On the abyss "; The abyss is the deep water which cannot be penetrated; whether caverns of unknown waters from which 12H. D. Austin, "Accredited Citations in Ristoro d' Arezzo's Composizione del Mondo, a Study of Sources" (Ph. D dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1911); reference in Adams, p. 336; see also p. 432. 13Isidore EtymolOgies, Chapt. 14, translated by Ernest Brehaut in An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages; Isidore of Seville (New York: Burt Franklin reprint, 1964), p. 240. 27

springs and rivers flow; or the waters that pass secretly beneath, whence it is called abyss. For all waters or torrents return by secret channels to the abyss which is their source. 14 Roman encyclopaedists like Pliny and Seneca expressed surprise that the ocean level did not rise with the addition of water from the rivers. This was the problem that led them to consider the origin of springs and floods. In the medieval period it was the well-known verse in Ecclesiastes (1:7) that underlined the anomaly. The favoured solution was the reversed hydrologic cycle, whether this was based on the authority of Pliny and Seneca, or read into the Ecclesiastes itself. It was acknowledged that the sun could draw up some of the water from the sea or that the winds might skim water off its surface but the chief cause lay in the subterranean connections. The bias may be detected in Isidore. It was clearly expressed, using the authority of Ecclesiastes against the opinions of certain pagan philosophers, by Friar Bartholomew sometime before 1260. In an English translation of De proprietatibus rerum (Berthelet edition of 1535), Bartholomew admitted the view of philosophers who "tells that swete waters that renne in to the see bene consumpte and wasted by heate of the sonne, ozels they ben foode and nouryshynge of saltnesse of the see, But Ecclesiastes, the maker of waters saythe that they come ayen by prevy veynes of the erthe to the well heedes, and cometh out of the mother, that is the see, and walmeth and springeth out in weele heedes. ,,15 John Swan in his Speculum mundi, to give an example from the seventeenth century, appealed to the authority of Ecclesiastes 1: 7 in arguing for subterranean circulation. The "aeriall vapours" of Aristotle may contribute to the volume of flow but Solomon makes it plain that the sea is the principal cause of all rivers. The freshness of the springs, always a problem in the reversed hydrologic cycle, Swan ascribed to "percolation and straining through the narrow springie passages of the earth. ,,16 14Ibid., Chapt. 20, p. 241. 15Bertholomeus de proprietatibus rerum, translated by John de Trevisa, edited by Berthelet (London, 1535), Bk. XIII, Chapt. 3, CLXXVII. 16John Swan, Speculum Mundi (Cambridge, 1643), pp. 200-201.

28

The persistence of the ancient doctrine that the ani mated body mirrored the main elements of the universe tended to influence opinion towards the reversed hydrologic cycle. As blood vessels permeate the human body so do channels the body of the earth. William Caxton's The Mirrour of the World is translated from a thirteenth century source. In it is the passage: All is lyke wyse as the blood of a man gooth out & yesueth in somme place, aIle in lyke wyse renneth the water by the vaynes of therthe and sourdeth and spryngeth out by the fontaynes and welles; fro which it gooth al aboute that, whean one delveth in therthe depe in medowe or in montaygne or in valeye, men fynde water. . . . 17 Caxton's translation was first made in 1481; later editions appeared in 1490 and 1529. The extension of the doctrine of microcosm into the Elizabethan period is seen in the following extract from Sir Walter Ralegh's The History of the World. [Man's) blood, which disperseth itself by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the earth, his breath to the air, his natural heat to the inclosed warmth which the earth has itself. . . . 18 Even in the eighteenth century the doctrine of microcosm could receive a hearing in London's Royal Society. Thus in 1736, before that august Society, Christopher Packe commended glowingly the "concerted Regularity" of the valleys in Kent and likened them to the veins of the body (Fig. 3). Packe, however, attempted to compare a system of valleys eroded on the earth's surface with a system of veins inside an animated body. The analogy, though inapt, was doggedly pursued. Packe merely hinted at the existence of a subterranean net of channels, "analogous to the arteries." His account of the hydrologic cycle was 17William Caxton, Mirrour of the World, edited by Oliver H. Prior (Extra Series CX [London: Early English Text Society, 1913]), p. 109; first published, 1481. 18Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World, Bk. I, Chapt. II, Sec. V, in The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh (Oxford, 1829), p. 59. 29

;'.s

1'1(.\1 (.

t••

IlIlIIo.:::>'I'-'V ...

Fig. 3.

Drainage of south-east Kent as symbolized by a halfkneeling man, from a manuscript map in the Ankographia by Christopher Packe.

30

in fact superterranean. 19 There is no logical contradiction between the idea of a reversed hydrologic cycle and the superterranean system we have come to accept. Scholars in different ages have not hesitated to subscribe to both until well into the eighteenth century. In St. Basil's Hexameron and Isidore's Etymologies the two cyclesone operating above and one below the surface-are described as though they bear no relation to each other: the one above accounts for the phenomena of clouds and rain, the one below the origin of springs and rivers. In Caxton's rendering of The Mirrour of the World, water in the veins of the earth is described as flowing out of fountains and wells. But in it there is also a sketch of a water cycle that runs its course above the earth's surface. The sonne is the foundement of all hete . . . . Whan the sonne spredeth his rayes vpon therthe & upon the mareys ['marais' -marshes] he dryeth them strongly, and draweth vpon the moisture which he enhaunseth on hye. But this is a moisture subtyl . . . named vapour; and it mounteth unto the myddle of thayer, and there it assembleth. . . and lytil & lytil it increceth, that it cometh thycke and derke in suche wise that it taketh fro vs the sight of the sonne. And this 19 Christopher Packe, A Dissertation upon the Surface of the Earth, as Delineated in a Speciman of a Phllosophicochorographical Chart of East Kent (London, 1737), pp. 4-5. It may be added that the macro-microcosmic doctrine does not necessitate a subterranean interpretation of the hydrologic cycle, Processes through the aerial regions may be likened to processes inside an animated body. Charles Singer draws attention to a particularly crude analogy from the writings of Saint Hildegard (1098-1180) of Bingen. She describes how "if the excess of waters below are drawn up to the clouds (by the just judgment of God in the requital of sinners), then the moisture from the ~ aquosus transudes through the fortis et albus lucidusque aer as a draught drunk into the urinary bladder; and the same waters descend in an inundation, " Charles Singer, "The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard" in Studies in the History and Method of Science, edited by C. Singer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 39. 31

thynge is the c loude. . . . And when it groweth over thycke, it becometh water which falleth on the erthe.. 20 Caxton's presentation of a dual system of water movement found close parallel in other popular Renaissance works such as those by William Fulke and Pierre de la Primaudaye. In all three the water cycle above the ground explained the phenomenon of precipitation but not any kind of surface run-off. For the origin of springs and rivers, explanation was persistently sought in a subterranean source based usually (though not inevitably) on the idea of a reversed hydrologic cycle. The dual system appears to have remained popular, if less naively assumed, through the course of the seventeenth century. Consider, for example, the most esteemed work on physical geography for that period-and indeed into the eighteenth century-the Geographia Generalis of Bernhard Varenius. To the question why the ocean was not bigger when it received so many rivers, Varenius gave two answers: one was that the water delivered to the sea was returned to the springs and rivers through subterranean passages; and the other affirmed that much of the vapour that was removed from the ocean and transported to the higher regions became rain, some of which then fell into the sea and some on the land. Varenius acknowledged that various views existed on the origin of the water that supplied the springs and rivers. He provided a lengthy review of ideas, those of Seneca, Aristotle, Cardanus, and of philosophers closer to his time. For Varenius the main difficulty in the subterranean theory was to explain the upward movement of water, and the hoary problem of how the sea water lost its saltiness in the process. He arrived at a compromise, and in the English translation provided by Richard Blome, said: "Therefore the waters of Fountains proceed partly from the Sea or Subterranean waters, partly from Rivers, and Dew, that moisten the Earth. But the water of Rivers partly proceedeth from Springs, and partly from Rain and Snow. ,,21 In Thomas Robinson (d. 1719) we have an English naturalist of the Lake District who can lay no special claim to scientific 20Caxton, p. 11 7 . 21Bernhard Varenius, Cosmography and Geography, Blome translation of the Geographia Generalis (London, 1682), p. 116. 32

distinction. His three published works on natural history contain ideas that are naive even for his time and are heavily laced with theology, but they also reveal a deep personal knowledge of the mines in Cumberland, and occasionally show sharp insights on the structure of mountains. Of interest to our theme is his New Observations on the Natural History of the World of Matter, published in 1696. In it is a diagram (reproduced in Fig. 4) which illustrates clearly the common notion of how water circulates both above and below the earth's surface. Above the earth's surface vapours are shown to rise out of the seas; they move to the mountains where they condense into showers and may at times cause the rivers to flood. But, despite this belief Robinson was in no doubt that springs and rivers originate, not in rain, but in waters that move upward through a complex maze of subterranean "dikes" and veins to the mountain tops where they burst forth in springs. 22 In an earlier essay, Robinson believed he could detect an analogy between the bursting forth of fountains at the mountain top and the breaking of a blood vessel in the animal's neck. Mountain tops are more subject to accidents (tempests and thunder) than the flat plains where the veins are thickly buried. "And thus, in our Bodies, 'tis much easier to break a Vein in the Neck or Arm, where they lye nearest the skin; than in the Buttocks, or any other such Fleshy-part. ,,23 The belief that a system of subterranean passages connected the sea with surface drainage lingered on at least to the last quarter of the eighteenth century. John Wesley's popularization of science, highly successful in terms of circulation and republication, is evidence of its persistence. He admitted the greater role of vapours rising from the sea in the provision of water on the land: That this is really the case, will easily be allowed, by all who serious ly consider, 1. That the vapours rising from the sea, are more than sufficient to supply both the surface of the earth, and the rivers with water. 2. That the mountains, by their particular structure, arrest the vapours that 22Thomas Robinson, New Observations on the Natural History of the World of Matter (London, 1696), pp. 42-43. 23Robinson, The Anatomy of the Earth (London, 1694), p. 14. 33

..

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Fig. 4. Thomas Robinson's conception of the sub- and superterranean circulations of water in New Observations on the Natural History of the World of Matter (1696). Legend as given by the author: A. The Central Fire disseminating a Vital heat, through the whole Cortex or Shel of the Globe. B. The Mountains from the Centre to the Surface. C. Heaths D. Plains E. The Channel of the Sea. The flatt Strata or Beds of Matter with their Acclivities to the Mountains and Declivities to the Seas together with their Elevations and Depressions thus described~. The windings and turnings of the greater Veins, Dividing the several Classes of Matter described thus ~ through which the whole Mass of subterranean Water Circulates. Their Lesser Fibres, or Rami Factions, filling all the flat Strata with feeders of Water, which breaking out upon

7

float in the atmosphere, and having collected them in their reservoirs, dismiss them again through their sides, either in perpetual or intermitting currents. Nevertheless Wesley added: "And yet we need not deny, that some springs may arise from the sea, or the great abyss: those in particular, which at all times afford the same quantity of water. ,,24 The role of the air, whether as a medium through which vapours move or as an agent transporting the vapours back and forth between the sea and the land is, of course, irrelevant to the reversed hydrologic cycle. An important argument for the subterranean supply of water to springs and rivers is that their volume of flow appears to be largely independent of rainfall fluctuations, that is, of events in the air. This apparent independence is particularly striking in the cavernous limestone country of the Mediterranean basin. 25 There may also be another, more complex reason for emphasizing a subterranean source independent of the vagaries of weather. Atmospheric turbulences are signs of an inconstant and imperfect nature below the orbit of the moon. The Garden of Eden is without weather. Ideally Eden is a balmy and sunny place having more or less the climate of sub-tropical desert, and yet watered by four perennial streams. Such geography demands a subterranean source for surface water. (b) The hydrologic cycle, cosmic order and the circle of perfection. "One of the most convenient Hieroglyphicks of God is a circle . . . and a circle is endlesse; His Sun and Moone I

24John Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation (London, 1777), pp. 27-28; first published, 1763. 25K. Kretschmer, "Die Physische Erdkunde im Christlichen Mittelalter, " Geographysiche Abhandlungen harausgegeben von Albrecht Penck (Vienna, 1889), pp. 81-83.

the Surface of the Earth cause Springs & c. described thus ~~~ ~

F. The Seas with the Rivers flowing into them from the Tops of the Mountains swelling them into a Gibbosity; and causing in them a Continual Fermentation. G. Vapors Arising from the Seas, which being Attracted by the Coldness of the Mountains, fixeth there; Forming an Atmosphere round the whole Globe.

r' and stars move circularly. ,,26 Commenting on this remark of Donne's, Marjorie Nicolson observes that "No metaphor was more loved by Renaissance poets than that of the circle, which they had inherited from Pythagorean and Platonic ancestors, who in turn had borrowed it from orientals, to whom the serpent, swallowing its tail, was an 'Hieroglyphick' of eternity. ,,27 The circle of perfection, Christianized, became a symbol of the perfection and wisdom of God. Chaos would have reigned but for God who had imposed order and bade the stars and the moon to move in circular form and take their places in the celestial hierarchy. However, the circular perfection of classical philosophy existed only in the heavens above the orbit of the moon. Below it was the region of change and irregularity. The sub lunar elements -fire, air, water, and earth-lacked not only the permanence of the celestial bodies but also their orderliness of motion. Pythagoras' speech in Ovid's Metamorphoses encapsulates the theme of elemental evanescence. In the English translation (1626) the speech proclaims that though the elements have their several seats, yet all Of these are made, to these again they fall. Received earth to water rarifies; To air extenuated waters rise; To air, when it itself again refines, To elemental fire extracted shines. They in like order back again repair; The grosser fire condenseth into air; Air into water; water, thick'ning, then Grows solid and converts to earth again. None holds his own: for nature ever joys In change and with new forms supplies. 28 The theme of the mutability of elements and their linkage to the doings of man was a common one in Elizabethan literature. 26John Donne, Sermon, Christmas Day 1624, in The Sermons of John Donne, edited by E. M. Simpson and G. R. Potier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), VI, p. 173. 27Marjorie H. Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 47. 280vid Metamorphoses, translated by George Sandys (London, 1626). 36

It promoted melancholia.

Mutability reigned beneath the moon; it signified a defective nature. But mutability orderly enacted within a cyclic frame could be interpreted as a pattern of the good. In the sublunary sphere perfection may find its image in the cycles of change rather than in the circles of motion. Thus the transmutation of elements lent itself also to optimistic reading. It had in fact been variously used to demonstrate the power of God, to illustrate the virtue of exchange, and as an argument against the possibility of universal decay Now, the cycle of the transmutation of elements contains the smaller hydrologic cycle. "To air extenuated waters rise" and then air changes back into water, but water-in the hydrologic cycle-does not "thicken" into earth. During the Renaissance, and in fact until well into the seventeenth century, it was possible to expound the cyclic transmutation of elements together with the cyclic changes in the state of water. Both may be admired as part of one grand circuit; or each separately. Consider, for example, Saluste du Bartas' very popular and influential account of the Creation, first published in 1578. On the seventh day of the first week, God rested and was pleased to contemplate His works. Of all that He had achieved it is significant that (according to Du Bartas) the first item He picked out for citation was the hydrologic cycle. One while, hee sees how the 'ample Sea doth take The Liquid homage of each other Lake; And how again the Heav'ns exhale, form it, Aboundant vapours (for our benfit). And yet it swels not for those tribute streams, Nor yet it shrinks not for those boyling beams. 29 In these few lines the cycle provides a scheme for hinting at the virtues of exchange and balance in the created world, which, at the same time, provides for man. In Sir Walter Ralegh's The History of the World, we find first belief in the transmutation of elements: how water by condensation may become earth; earth rarefied may become water; water, air; air, fire. Then he uses the hydrologic cycle as a process in nature that illustrates God's power. Without the exercise of that power nature would become "silent, virtueless, 0

29Du Bartas: His Divine Weekes and Workes, translated by Josuah Sylvester (London, 1621), p. 140; first published 1578. 37

and dead. " For as it is God's infinite power and every-wherepresence . . . that giveth to the sun power to draw up vapours, to vapours to be made clouds; clouds to contain rain, and rain to fall: so all second and instrumental causes, together with nature itself, without that operative faculty which God gave them, would become altogether silent, virtueless, and dead: of all which excellently Orpheus, Per te virescunt omnia; 'All things by thee spring forth in youthful green. ,30 The cyclicity of all aspects of nature was pursued with unrelenting persistence in the Ecclesiastes of the Bible. The book provided a rich source for the more exhalted kind of moralizing. Gregory of Nyssa (330 A. D. - ?) for example, preached a sermon on Ecclesiastes and asked that man contemplate the circular processes of nature. Note how the sea is the receptacle for waters which flow into it from all sides. Why does the sea grow no larger? Gregory did not answer his own question in this particular sermon; instead he pointed to another recurrent phenomenon, the revolution of the sun about the earth. 31 It is ironic that Ecclesiastes, an example of pessimistic Oriental literature, should so often have been used to illustrate, not the vanity but the Wisdom, of all created things. The world-weary wisdom of the preacher was taken to support the world-affirming wisdom of God. In the early part of the seventeenth century George Hakewill wrote to declare "the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World" and to censure "the common Error touching Natures Perpetuall and Universall Decay. " One of the arguments was taken from the "weightie authoritie" of Solomon, "The wisest man that ever lived, " and "his reason drawne from the Circulation of all things as it were in a ring. " 30Ralegh, Bk. I, Chapt. I, Sec. X. 31Gregory of Nyssa, On Ecclesiastes, Sermon I, in From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa's MysticalWritings, selected by Jean Danielon, translated and edited by Herbert Musurillo (London: J. Murray, 1963). Elsewhere he explained the constancy of river flow by the ancient doctrine of the transmutation of elements: that earth can change into water, and water into earth. See Kretschmer, pp. 93 -95. 38

How often, Hakewill noted, does Solomon "beat upon the circulation and running round of all things." Both the wind and the water move in circuits. "Whereupon hee inferres, the thing that hath beene, it is that that shall bee, and that which is done, is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the Sunne. ,,32 From this rather drab conclusion, Hakewill drew the cheerful inference that nature does not suffer universal decay. And within the scheme of the "Circulation of all things, 11 Hakewill was to contribute in a modest way to the twin ideas of the hydrologic and geologic cycles. It should be said that not only Solomon and the English divine Hakewill 'fiJeat upon the circulation and running around of all things." Among outstanding scientists of the seventeenth century, William Harvey and Robert Hooke saw the pervasiveness of circular processes in nature. To Harvey circular motion was the noblest form of motion. He accepted the teaching of Aristotle and believed that sublunary bodies and living organisms aspired to the pattern of the circle as displayed in the orbits of the heavenly bodies. After giving an account of his epochal discovery on the nature of blood circulation, he drew attention to the hydrologic cycle-not to the reversed cycle but to the one above ground in which water was driven by the heat of the sun. The heart, seat of organic life, was compared with the sun; and just as the motion of air and water emulated the circular pattern of the superior, heavenly bodies, so the movement of blood emulated that of superterranean water. The moist earth, warmed by the sun, evaporates; the vapours drawn upwards are condensed, and descending in the form of rain, moisten the earth again; and by this arrangement are generations of living things produced . . . . And so, in all likelihood, does it come to pass in the body, through the motion of the blood; the various parts are nourished, cherished, quickened by the warmer, more perfect, vaporous, spirituous, and, as I may say, alimentive blood; which, on the contrary, in contact with these parts becomes cooled, coagulated, and, so to speak, effete; whence it returns to its sovereign the heart, 32George Hakewill, An Apologie (3rd edition; Oxford, 1635), p. 53; first published, 1627. 39

as if to its source, or to the inmost home of the body, there to recover its state of excellence or perfection . . . . [All] this depends on the motion and action of the heart . . . . The heart, consequently, is the beginning of life; the sun of the microcosm, even as the sun in his turn might well be designated the heart of the world. 33 Near the end of the seventeenth century, Robert Hooke wrote: Nature . . . is, as it were, a continual circulation. Water is rais'd in Vapours into the Air by one Quality and precipated [sic] down in drops by an other, the Rivers run into the Sea, and the Sea again supplies them. In the circular Motion of all the Planets, there is a direct Motibn which makes them indeavour to recede from the Sun or Center, and a magnetic or attractive Power that keeps them from receding. Generation creates and Death destroys; Winter reduces which Summer produces. . . . All things almost circulate and have their Vicissitudes. 34 There are echoes of the Preacher in this passage. Its special relevance to our theme is the juxtaposition of circles of motion with cycles of change. Unlike Hakewill and Harvey, Hooke did not impute any special virtue to the circulatory process; he simply noted it as a law of nature. In works of a more popular and philosophical kind, belief in the superior virtues of circular motion persisted into the nineteenth century-although "virtue" tended to take on increasingly utilitarian meaning. Evidence of continuing interest in the "round circuit" lay in the repetitive references to the 33William Harvey, "An Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals" [Exercitatio Anatomica, first published in 1628] in The Works of William Harvey, M. D. , translated by Robert Willis (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1965), pp. 46-47. 34Robert Hooke, "The Earth grows old and less fruitful" in A Discourse of the Causes of Earthquakes, July 30, 1699, in The Posthumous Works of Dr. Robert Hooke, edited by Richard Waller (London, 1705), p. 313. 40

hydrologic cycle in the more popular works on natural theology of the early part of the nineteenth century. Occasionally, faith in the special merit of circular motion found more fulsome and explicit expression, as, for example, in the writings of Thomas Dick. "To insure all the advantage we now derive from the liquid element, " wrote Dick, "motion was requisite." Had the waters been in a stagnant state a thousand inconveniences and disasters would have inevitably followed. But the All-wise Creator has impressed upon its various masses a Circulating motion. . . . The rills pour their liquid stores into the rivers; the rivers roll their watery treasures into the ocean. By the solar heat, a portion of these oceanic waters is carried up into the atmosphere, till at last it descends in rain and dew, to supply the springs . . . so that there is a constant motion and circulation of the watery element, that it may serve as an agent for carrying forward the various processes of nature, and for ministering to the wants of man and beast. 35 The theme of the hydrologic cycle appears to have encouraged the luxuriance of pseudo-science and much fervid prose. As one of the more sensible manifestations of circularity and order in nature it served also, though with far greater restraint and far more sparingly, as poetiC analogy or simile for the ways of God and the fate of man. Scattered instances of this poetic use occur from Isaiah to Goethe. In Isaiah (55:10-11), the Lord says, For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the things whereto I sent it. John the Scot (ca. 800-ca. 880), in his De divisione naturae, adduced the harmony and divine revelation in nature from 35Thomas Dick, The Christian Philosopher (8th edition; Glasgow, 1842), p. 112. 41

the cyclical course of all things. The movement of divine goodness is compared with the cyclic movement of water. As the river flows from the source downward to the sea, so "divine goodness . . . flows downward like a stream, first into the primordial causes, bringing them into being. Next, continuing downward through these primordial causes, ineffable in their workings, but still in harmony with them, they flow from higher to lower, finally reaching the lowest ranks of the All. The return flow is through the most secret pores of nature by a most concealed path to the source. ,,36 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 ?-1153), monk, powerful churchman as well as a theologian of mystical bent, compared the sea to Christ. "The sea is the source of fountains and rivers; the Lord Jesus Christ is the source of every kind of virtue and knowledge." In the following extract from a sermon both the subterranean and superterrane an courses of the hydrologic cycle appear as allegories for spiritual operations: If all waters seek incessantly to return to the sea, making their way thither sometimes by hidden and subterranean channels, so that they may go forth from it again in continual and untiring circuit, becoming visible once more to man and available for his service, why are not those spiritual streams rendered back constantly and without reserve to their legitimate source, that they may not cease to water the fields in our hearts? Let the rivers of diverse graces return from whence they came, that they may flow forth anew. Let the heavenly shower rise again to its heavenly source, that it may be poured anew and still more plentifully upon the earth. 37

36John of Scot, De Divisione Naturae, V, 866 A-D. Quotation is a paraphrase of John of Scot's idea given by C. J. Glacken in Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 210-211. 37Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon XIII in the Cantica C antic orum, translated by So J. Eales in Life and Works of Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, edited by John Mabillon (London: John Hodges, 1889), IV, p. 67; quoted in Wright, p. 200. 42

Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs are richly metaphorical. Parts of the water cycle appear again and again to illustrate relationships in the spiritual realm. Thus Christ, the true noontide sun, exterminates all shadows and dries up marshes (Sermon XXXIII, p. 218). But the demon noonday swallows up the rivers of the learned, and the torrents of those who are powerful (p. 224). Ingratitude is likened to a burning wind which dries up for itself the fountain of goodness, the dew of mercy and the flowing stream of grace (Sermon LI, p. 311). These use the image of evaporation, the upward component of the hydrologic cycle, The downward component finds expression in images of dew and rain: Our dry hearts are being watered by the dew of the word, and the plentiful rain, which God has reserved to His inheritance (p. 310). On the other hand, men of a turbulent spirit may cause the waters "to rise from the earth into the air, when they open their mouth against the heaven. . . and thus, like sour and bitter showers, make the earth marshy and barren" (Sermon LVIII, p. 350). The hydrologic cycle continues to be used for poetic effect in Renaissance literature. Heninger gives examples from the works of Thomas Nashe and Edmund Spenser. In Nashe a peculiar species of the reversed hydrologic cycle appears. Carried in one poetic flight is the idea that vapours are drawn out of the land by the sun; they are "received" into clouds which then dispose of them over the sea. "And had I [Christ] been in Heaven as I was on Earth, the Sunne shoulde have exhaled from thee all they trespasses as meteors, which the clowdes, his cofferers, receiving, might foorth-with have conduited downe into the Sea and drowned for ever, ,,38 One of the traditional symbols for Christ is the sun. In Spenser's translation of du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome, the rise and decline of Rome is described as a process analogous to the cyclic changes in the state of vapours. As clouds dissipate, so also will Roman power, thus demonstrating "that all in th'end to nought shall fade." Echoes of the Preacher again obtrude.

38Thomas Nashe, "Christs Teares over Jerusalem, " in Works, edited by R. B. McKerrow (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904); quoted in Heninger, p. 49. 43

No otherwise than raynie cloud, first fed With earthly vapours gathered in the ayre, Eftsoones in compas arch't, to steepe his hed, Doth plunge himselfe in Thetys bosome faire; And mounting up againe, from whence he came, With his great bellie spreds the dimmed world, Till at the last dissolving his moist frame, In raine, or snowe, or haile he forth is horld; This Citie, which was first but shepheards shade, Uprising be degrees, grewe to such height The Queen of land and sea her selfe she made. At last not able to beare so great weight, Her power disperst, though all the world did vede; To shew that all in th'end to nought shall fade. 39 Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) seemed partial to the imagery of the hydrologic cycle: it served his poetic purpose on more than one occasion. In "Eyes and Tears, " for example, appear the lines I have through every Garden been, Amongst the Red, the White, the Green; And yet, from all the flow'rs I saw, No Hony, but these Tears could draw. So the all-seeing Sun each day Distills the World with Chymick Ray; But finds the Essence only Showers, Which straight in pity back he powers. (Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems, London, 1681) But perhaps the most sensitive literary use of the hydrologic cycle occurs in Marvell's poem "On a Drop of Dew, " which is an allegory of human destiny. See how the Orient Dew, Shed from the Bosom of the Moon Into the blowing Roses, Yet careless of its Mansion new; For the dear Region where 'twas born 39Edmund Spenser, Ruines of Rome by du Bellay, 20:267-280, in The Minor Poems, edited by C. B. Osgood and H. G. Lotspeich (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1947); quoted in Heninger, p. 49. 44

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Round in it self incloses: And in its little Globes Extent, Frames as it can its native Element. How it the purple flow'r does slight, Scarce touching where it lyes, But gazing back upon the Skies, Shines with a mournful Ligbt; Like its own Tear, Because so long divided from the Sphear. Restless it routes and unsecure, Trembling lest it grow impure: Till the warm Sun pitty its Pain, And to the Skies exhale it back again So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day, Could it within the humane flow'r be seen, Remembering still its former height, Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green; And, recollecting its own Light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater Heaven in an Heaven less. 40 The circle of perfection was already breaking, according to Marjorie Nicolson, when Andrew Marvell wrote. 41 As a principle in ethics and esthetics this was undoubtedly true. The circle was an ever present guide to thought during the Renaissance. It ruled man's conception of the heavens and the earth, and the microcosmic body of man. It inspired poets as well as artists. By the later part of the seventeenth century the impact had weakened. But Milton could still take for granted that the circular motion was native to the elements; and as meteorologic science advanced, the model of circular perfection was preserved in the elaboration of the hydrologic cycle, a scheme in nature which served admirably to illustrate God's wisdom until well into the nineteenth century. Even the poetic treatment of the cycle had not disappeared with the seventeenth century. It was a ruling idea, for instance, with Goethe. Faust opens with the three archangels, each of whom notes a cyclic aspect of nature. In the "Klassische Walpurgisnacht" (Faust II, Act II) , 40Quoted in Nicolson, pp. 75-76. 41Ibid., p. 75. 45

Thales is made to praise the quiet rule of nature, to sing paeans to the slow but powerful influences of water and atmosphere on the earth. Through the mouth of Thales, Goethe brought together, in a dozen declamatory lines, the idea of the hydrologic cycle and of fluvial processes that result in mountains and plains. Heil ~ Heil ~ aufs neue ~ Wie ich mich bliihend freue, Vom Schonen, Wahren durchdrungen. Alles ist aus dem Wasser entsprungen:~ Alles wird durch das Wasser erhalten! Ozean, gonn' uns dein ewiges Walten. Wenn du nicht Wolken sendetest. Nicht reiche Bache spendetest, Hin und her nicht Flusse wendetest, Die Strome nicht vollandetest, Was waren Gebirge, was Ebnen und Welt? Du bist's, der des frischeste Leben erhlilt. In a poem of his early period, Goethe saw an analogy between the course of the human soul and the cyclic course of water. Des Menschen Seele Gleicht dem Wasser Vom Himmel kommt es, Zum Himmel steigt es, Und wieder nieder Zur Erde muss es Ewig wechselnd. (c) The vertical, one-dimensional cycle. Preceding verse 7 in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes is a verse that describes the circulation of the wind. "The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits." This verse, taken together with the more widely quoted and immediately succeeding verse concerning the sea, would have provided a basis for the correct conception of the hydrologic cycle. However, the two are not usually taken together. Verse seven read in isolation customarily summoned the idea of a subterranean circulation of water. Wind naturally had no part in the scheme. But, until the seventeenth century wind was of little or no importance even to a conception of the water cycle above the earth. 0

46

b

The horizontal component-the transfer of vapour from water to land and from land to water, the movement of wind from north to south and then back again "according to his circuit"is missing from most of the Renaissance characterizations of the hydrologic cycle. It does not appear, for instance, in the poetic, analogical treatments of the hydrologic cycle as they are presented in Spenser's translation of du Bellay, nor in a later period in Marvell's allegory. The dew's aspiration, as that of the human soul, was a vertical one. The lack of a horizontal component is to be expected for the medieval universe was a storeyed universe; and the medieval view of nature, one in which the elements -fire, air, water, and earth-are seen to lie one above the other, persisted into the seventeenth century. The ancient theory of the transmutation of elements emphasized changes along the vertical axis. Pythagoras' speech in Ovid's Metamorphoses has already been quoted to illustrate the idea (still popular in Elizabethan times) of the transmutation of elements from the one below to the one above, and then back again: "To air extenuated waters rise; To air, when it itself again refines, To elemental fire extracted shines. They in like order back again repair . . . . " Ovid's younger contemporary Philo, in arguing for the eternity of the world, presented a similar scheme of the continuous transmutation and balancing of elements up and down their storied structure. For earth will never anywhere stand mounted on water, nor water on air, nor air on fire. But the naturally heavy elements, earth and water, will occupy the central position. . . while the naturally light air and fire occupy the upper position. Once more we must not suppose that the world is destroyed by mutation, for there is a balance of powers in the interchange of the elements and such a balance produces unswerving stability and unshaken permanence, since it neither encroaches nor is encroached on. . . .42

42philo De aeternitate mundi, translated by F. H. Colson (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1929-1962), IX, pp. 115-116. 47

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The theme of the transmutation of substances lasted into the seventeenth century. It was broached, for instance, in Sir Walter Ralegh's highly popular and esteemed History of the World. And George Hakewill, on the frontispiece of his Apolo~, ringingly declared against the decay of the world, seeing as one of his arguments the spectacle of the cyclic mutation of elements up and down the stratified sublunary cosmos (Fig. 5). For as Earth is resolved into Water, the Water rarefied into Ayre, and the Ayre into Fire, in the way of their ascension; So in their descending downward, by a natural Compensation, the Fire becommeth Ayre, the Ayre thickeneth into Water, and the Water again into Earth. 43 Emphasis on the vertical dimension in circulating process appears also in alchemical thinking. The wheel is a favourite symbol in alchemy for the circulating process, the circulatio. The alchemists were well aware that their work in decomposing substances and putting them together again was a process which could be symbolized by a dragon biting its own tail or the wheel. But Carl Jung points out that the circulatio to them "meant first the ascensus and descensus, as for instance the rise and fall of birds symboliZing the preCipitation of vapours, and secondly the rotation of the universe as a model for the work, and hence the cycling of the year in which the work takes place. ,,44 Scientific meteorology in the sixteenth century was still largely based on Aristotle's Meteorologica and on a medieval conception of the universe derived from Aristotle and the Roman encyclopaedists. Among the works widely thought to be authoritative during the Renaissance was the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomew Anglicus. Written probably before 1260 by an English Franciscan, this work quickly travelled over Europe. It was translated into French in 1372, into Spanish, Dutch, and into English by John of Trevisa in 1398. 45 The English version 43 Hakewill, "The Argument of the Front and of the Worke, " An Apologie (frontispiece). 44Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (New York: Pantheon, 1953), p. 157. 45R . Steele, Medieval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus (London: Chatto and Windus, 1924), p. 1; first published, 1893. 48

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***,'***'*****'***** THE ARGVMENT OFTHE FRONT AND OF THE VVORKE.

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lthough the eRE A TOR and Difpofer ofall things hath left all Particulars and Individualls,under the cir~le of the Moon" to the flroake of 1i"" and 'D,atb I yet by His powcrfoll Hand He holdethbacketbe Sythe of 1im, from dcflroying or i_mpayring the Vniverfc : Though the falI\~.HaDd {hall at Iaft deUroy the Whole- by Pi". • In the ltJeane til1'll!i hltllllth fo-otdalacd,tha the t(cm~s of which aU fub-Iunary bocIiesarecompofcd doc fo l one the other, and are againe fo ~otten, eacll from other ; that while they fceme to dye,they kome immortall.For as Eartb is refolved ibto Wattr, the W/lter rarefied inw A,", and the A,rr into Pirt, in the way of their afa:Dfion, So in their defcending dov9h-\lvh~, bi a mutuall CompenJation the Pi" becommeth .A,",thc thickneth into Wattr,anJ the Wattr againe into &r,b. And as aShip which rideth at Anchor is tolred to and fTo ~ the Windes and Waves, and yet cannot move beyond the length omis ~ble, but is caric:d about in a Round JlilI , yet n~ver remooved• J moovmg Or a, a Jr1erle, at every turne, hringeth about all his Spo~kes to the fame place$, obferving a ~onl\ancy evcn in turmngSo though there be manychangeaandnriationsin the World, yet all things come about onetime or ang.. ther to the fame points againe. And there is nothing new under the S./fnt.

beg:

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Fig_ 5,

"And there is nothing new under the Sunne_" "The Argument of the Front and of the Worke, " from An Apologie by George Hakewill.

49

was first printed in 1495, again in 1535 (Berthelet edition), and then in an expanded and modified edition in 1582. The water cycle, based on Bede and Isidore, is described by Bartholomew as though it were essentially a one-dimensional process. For fumosyties that benne drawen out of the waters and of the erth by strength of he ate of heven, ben drawe to the nethermost party of the mydle space of the ayre and there by coldnes of the place they bene made thycke, & then by dissolvynge and departyng the moysture thereof and wastynge all, these fumosytyes ben resolved and fallen and tornen into reyne and shours. . . . 46 Bartholomew recognized the role of the winds in introducing moisture into the air but also thought that the dissolution of the cloud into rain was the result of heat. Wyndes that blowe uppon the see, gatheren moche humour of the over partyes of the water, and berynge them up with them in to the ayre, at laste they tourne in to mater of reyne. When there is moch matter in a watry cloude and the cloude is very thycke: the impression of beames is stronge upon the cloude so that at the last by vertu of that hete the cloud is dissolved & falleth . . . into strong reyne. 47 Rivers, however, were not caused by rain. Bartholomew subscribed to the subterranean theory; and so not only the upper horizontal component of the hydrologic cycle, the wafting of vapours from sea to land, was lacking but also the lower component, the return of water to the sea, which was not seen as part of a superterranean process (Fig. 6, top). Another source of meteorologic knowledge during the Renaissance was William Caxton's Mirrour of the World. Again it was not an original work but an English translation of the late Medieval poem Image du Monde. As with Bartholomew's work, in the Mirrour of the World the hydrologic cycle was given a characteristic vertical bias. The wording of the cycle closely paralleled that of Trevisa's translation of Bartholomew. In the Mirrour, however, an experiment was suggested to illustrate 46Bertholomeus de proprietatibus rerum (London, 1535), Bk. II, Chapt. 7, CLXI. 47Ibid. 50

b

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Diagrams illustrating various conceptions of the hydrologic cycle. Top: The Medieval and Renaissance conception. Centre: The hydrologic cycle according to John Ray. Bottom: The modern hydrologic cycle (after a popular textbook). ____ _. vapour - __ .. water

51

...

the processes that would lead to the formation of clouds and rain. As moisture rose out of the earth under the influence of the sun, so also "smoke or fumee" issued out of a wet cloth drying by the fire. And if a person should hold his hand over this "fumee, he sholde fele a vapour which sholde make his hande moyst and weet; yf it dured longe he sholde apertly knowe that his hande were all weet, and that water shold droppe and falle therof. ,,48 The most important and popular meteorologic treatise of the Renaissance, prepared by an Englishman for the English public, was William Fulke's A Goodly Gallery with a most pleas aunt prospect, into the garden of natural contemplation, to beholde the naturall causes of all kinds of Meteors. First published in 1563, it was reprinted in 1571, 1601, and 1602. Fulke's characterization of the hydrologic cycle was again essentially vertical. He said that to understand vapours one must see them as warm and moist fumes and smokes, easily resolvable into water, much like the breath that comes out of a man's mouth or out of a pot of water standing on fire. These vapours are drawen up from the waters and watry places, by the heate of the Sunne, even unto the midle region of the ayre, and there after diverse maner of meating with coldness many kynde of moist Meteors are generated, as sometime cloudes and ryne, sometime snowe and hayle. 49 The phenomenon of evaporation was readily observed. Since the early Middle Ages its relation to the heat of the sun or the burning wind admitted no doubt. Nevertheless, in compliance with the scientific temper of his treatise, Fulke evoked a commonplace experience and then argued for the conclusions to be drawn from it. If there be a plate of water on a s mothe and hard stone, standing in the heate of the sunne, it wyl soone be drye, which is none otherwyse, but the sonne draweth up the water in thinne vapores, for no man is . . . fonde to saye, that it can sinke into stoone or metall,. and it is as great foly to thinke, 48C axton, p. 118. 49William Fulke, A Goodly Gallery with a most pleasaunt prospect. . . (London, 1571), opp. Folio 3; first published, 1563. 52

it is consumed to nothyng: for it is a general rule, that that which is once a thing, can not by chaunging become nothyng [opp. Folio 3]. William Fulke's exposition of the vertical hydrologic cycle and related meteorologic processes was more thorough than those that can be found in other works published in England during the sixteenth and in the early decades of the seventeenth century. He attempted to explain the zonal pattern of rain as well as its seasonal distribution in terms of the angle that the sun's beams make with the earth. In places where the Sunnes beames strike directly against the earth, and the water, the heat is so great, that it burneth up the exhalations and vapors, so that there are no fiery Meteors, much lesse watery as it is in the South partes of the world under and near to the Equinoctall lyne. But in places where the beames are cast indirectly, and obliquely, & where they are not nyghe to the direct beames, nor to farre of from them: there is a moderate heate, drawyng out great aboundaunce of matter, so that in those contries, many Meteores of many sortes as generated, as in the farre North partes are few, but watrie impressions [Folio 4, opp. Folio 5]. Fulke thought that the inclination of the sun's beams also explained why, in his experience, "In Autumne & Sprynge, are oftener Meteores seen, then in Sommer and Wynter, except it be in such places, where the Sommer and Wynter are of the temper of Spryng and Autumne" (opp. Folio 5). Clouds are vapours made thick in the middle region of the air. Their height above the ground varies, ''1 thinke they be sometime nine mile, sometime three myle, sometime halfe a myle, & somtyme lesse than a quarter of a myle from the earth" (opp. Folio 48), Fulke's judicious guesses fall commendably close to modern conceptions of cloud height. The vertical hydrologic cycle appears in two French Renaissance works: La Sepmaine of Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas and l'Academie Fransoise of Pierre de la Primaudaye. Both were translated into English at the opening of the seventeenth century and immediately gained a wide public. Du Bartas' La Sepmaine was particularly influential; his name was evoked in 53

Spenser's rendition of the Antiquitez de Rome (in which the hydrologic cycle served as poetic analogy), and frequently in George Hakewill's Apologie. La Sepmaine (Divine Weekes and Workes in English) is also believed to have exerted a strong influence on Milton's Paradise Lost. Du Bartas' account of the Creation was first published in 1578, and within six years demand appears to have justified the printing of another thirty editions. In 1605 Joshua Sylvester rendered the complete sequence of the Divine Weekes into English verse, although portions of it-including the section on meteors--had been translated earlier. The English rendition was very close to the original and proved popular; other editions were issued in 1608, 1611, 1613, and 1621. 50 The hydrologic cycle was likened to the processes in the alembic. For, like as in a Limbeck, th 'heat of Fire Raiseth a Vapour, which still mounting higher To the Still's top; when the odoriferous sweat Above that Mitre can no further get, It softly thickning, falleth drop by drop, And cleer as Crystall, in the glass doth hop; The purest humor in the Sea, the Sun Exhales in th'Aire: which there resolv'd anon, Returns to water; and descends again By sundry waies unto his Mother Main. 51 In contrast with the traditional views propagated by Bartholomew and Fulke, and with that of his fellow countryman and contemporary La Primaudaye, Du Bartas appears to have believed that fountains, springs, and rivers were fed by water condensed in the air rather than by water conducted through subterranean channels. Water "thickened" in the air returns to "his Mother Main" by sundry ways. One way is that the water enters the dry earth "through the wide sive of her void entrails, " and out of the cavernous earth it pours in a thousand fountains. These Fountains make fresh Brooks with murmuring currents; These murmuring Brooks, the swift and violent Torrents; 50Heninger, p. 19. 51Du Bartas: His Divine Weekes and Works, p. 50. 54

These violent Torrents, mighty Rivers; These, These Rivers make the vast, deep, dreadfull Seas. Melting snow on the mountains also contributes to the volume of the streams which eventually join to form a large river, And that, at length, however great and large (Lord of the Plain) doth in some Gulf discharge His parent-Tribute to Oceanus, According to th 'Externall Rendez-vous [po 501. Du Bartas' hydrologic cycle is more flexible than other popular accounts of it in the late Renaissance. In his exposition, water was returned to the sea not only directly as rain over the sea but indirectly through rivers; and these rivers were fed by the rain and snow that fell on dry land. Only one major segment of the hydrologic cycle failed to find specific statement, and that was the upper horizontal component-the movement of vapours in the air from the sea to the land. But perhaps it can be pressed that this movement is implied in Du Bartas' account of the hydrologic cycle, in the following lines and in the lines already quoted. All streams enter "in the Main Sea, " and yet "do naught at all augment her. " For that, besides that all these Floods in one, Matcht with great Neptune, seem as much as none; The Sun (as yerst I said) and Windes withall, Sweeping the sun-face of the Brinie-Ball, Extract as much still of her humours thin, As weeping Aire and welling Earth pours in [po 511. Pierre de la Primaudaye's l'Academie Franqoise is an encyclopaedic compilation that includes, besides a "notable description of the whole World, " also the "Manners and Callings of all Estates, " the "Soule and Body of Man, " and Christian philosophy. The third volume of the l'Academie contains a section on the meteors. It was published in 1590 and translated into English by R. Dolman in 1601. The entire work, completed in French in 1613, was translated into English by Thomas Bowes in 1618. The prose exposition of the French Academie is more soberly moralizing than Du Bartas' poetic account. The meteors, for instance, teach us the providence of God; it is however a grim sort of providence for lightnings, floods, and whirlwinds are supposed to remind us of it. Again, the hydrologic cycle presented by La Primaudaye is characteristically 55

vertical in emphasis. Air tends "alwaie upwards, and . . . is continually mooved up and downe. "52 Clouds "are nothing else but vapors attracted out of the waters by the power of the sun" (p. 747). They ascend like "a great smoke" and we have experience of this when wet cloth is left to dry before the fire or in the sun. So it is then, that the water ceaseth not to mount from earth up into the aire, and then to descend down againe, for the course thereof is perpetuall, as if there were a sea mounting from earth to heaven, which we call Aire, then descending from thence down hither to us [po 747}. However, La Primaudaye saw that vapours served little purpose if they simply remained over the sea to be condensed into clouds and returned to the sea as rain. The providence of God therefore ordained that the vapours be carried in clouds "like chariots" to be distributed "through all the quarters of the world." Had a La Primaudaye then presented the clouds as the source of water for the springs and rivers, we would have had a modern hydrologic cycle that included the horizontal component. But the French encyclopaedist failed to connect the rivers with the rain clouds; he subscribed to the subterranean hypothesis and saw the fountains through which the waters came as being connected with the sea by conduits in the bowels of the earth (p. 769). It may be said in summary that the hydrologic cycle was conceived as essentially the transmutations of water up and down the vertical during the Renaissance, but that works written in the last quarter of the sixteenth century began to show an awareness of the horizontal component. This awareness was still partial. Thus in the Divine Weekes of Du Bartas the upper segment, the horizontal transport of vapours in the air, was lacking; whereas in La Primaudaye's Academie it was the lower segment, the movement of the waters back to the sea. The role of moving air in the lateral transportation of vapours also appears to have been little understood by Renaissance writers. One probable explanation is that philosophers before the middle of the seventeenth century were still unsure whether the wind 52Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie, translated by Thomas Bowes (London, 1618), p. 736. 56

was a "meteor, " i. e., a dry "exhalation" (according to Aristotle)-just as vapour was a moist "exhalation"-or whether it was simply a moving current of air as Hippocrates believed. Bartholomew wavered between the two ideas. To William Fulke the "wynd is an exhalation whote and drie, drawne up into the aire by the power of the Sunne, & by reason of the wayght thereof being driven down . . . . ,,53 John Swan, in a compendium (1635) that strongly reflected the influence of Du Bartas and Fulke, endorsed this view. He characterized as false the theory that wind was simply moving air, and affirmed "that winds are generated by virtue of the Sunne, which causeth an hot and drie Exhalation to be evaporated, or aspired out of the earth. ,,54 La Primaudaye, on the other hand, confidently asserted that "the windes are nothing else but the aire, which is mooved and driven more violently than ordinarie . . . . ,,55 It is curious that winds are almost entirely seen as the effect of meteorolOgiC processes rather than as a cause. How is the air moved to produce wind? It is moved, according to La Primaudaye, "either by the heate of the Sunne, or by the vapours and exhalations which this heat causeth to rise out of the waters, and out of the earth, or by the waves of the Sea, or by the cause of the earth, and such like causes . . . " (p. 736). Clouds transport vapour to l'all quarters of the world" like chariots (p. 747), but La Primaudaye nowhere suggested it was the wind that drove the chariots. We may add that not only the speed but the direction of surface winds often seems quite unrelated to the motion of clouds, especially high clouds. This has been a puzzle to weather observers in the eighteenth century; and indeed the relation between the general movement of winds, vapour transport, and cloud formation is not at all obvious.

Fertility and the Problem of Dissolution One attraction of the hydrologic cycle is that it explains the origin of rain and rivers which are essential to the maintenance of the earth's productivity. Let us note first that the value placed on rain water as distinct from river water has varied 53 Fulke, Folio 18. 54Swan , p. 167. 55La Primaudaye, p, 736. 57

through time. In the ancient world, under the influence of the commonly accepted supremacy of Egypt's Nile, it would seem that river water was thought to be somewhat superior to water from the sky on which a country like Greece, for example, depended. Rain water was liable to fluctuate and disappoint the Greek farmer in his hour of need; the Egyptian farmer, in contrast, could depend on the Nile which, of its own accord, flooded his field and then withdrew from it. 56 The symbolism of water is extremely rich in the Bible and in the exegetical literature of the Church Fathers: the water is the living water of the fountain which cleanses, washes away the stains of sin, quenches thirst, refreshes the People of God, and is fruitful. Showers are a sign of God's pleasure: over the restored Holy Land showers of rain and dew will make the sand and the wilderness bear fruit (Isaiah 35).57 But images of springs and fountains, of pure water bubbling out of the ground, are far more common than those of water falling from the clouds. Away from the semi-aridity of the eastern Mediterranean basin, in southern and particularly northwestern Europe, the bias appears to have swung in favour of rain water. The belief that rain water was superior to other forms of water in fertilizing the earth was noticeable in the meteorologic literature of the Renaissance and it lingered on to the end of the seventeenth century. One encounters opinions such as that in the Berthelet edition of the Bartholomeus de proprietatibus rerum (1535): Though rain water easily putrefies, ". . . it is more freshe and swete than other waters, when it abydeth in his owne clerenes and vertue." Rain water is "hevenly water" and is therefore ''most proffitable to things that growe in erthe." And after 56Herodotus, The History of Herodotus, translated by George Rawlinson ("Great Books of the Western World, " VI; Chicago, London . . . : Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), Bk. II, Chapt. 13-14. Herodotus, however, sees that as the land continues to rise it will soon be out of the reach of Nile floods; and since there is no rain in Egypt it will be worse off than Greece. See Glacken, pp. 89-90. 57See, for example, the short essay on "Water, Drink, Fountain, "by R. C. Walls in A Theological Word Book of the Bible, edited by Alan Richardson (New York: Macmillan Paperbacks, 1962), pp. 279-281. 58

br

rain water "welle water is beste . . . for the welle is heed and spryng of lyryng water, that springeth and renneth continually out of pryvye veynes of the erthe. ,,58 A probable reason for the belief in the special powers of rain water is that it was drawn as vapour out of the earth by the heat of the sun, and that rain water retained some of the generative virtues of the sun's heat. Thus William Fulke wrote in The Goodly Gallery, The rain water doubtles, doth more encrease and cherishe thinges growyng on the earth, than any other water wherwith they may be watered, because the rain water, reteinerth much of the sunns heate in it, that is no smal comfort to all growing plantes. However, Fulke had to admit, a little reluctantly, that in rainless countries like Egypt and Syria, the overflowings of the rivers do "marvelous ely fatten the earth. ,,59 There was also the association of the pouring of rain from heaven with the descent of God's grace. The dry cisterns of the heart are "watered by the dew of the word, and the plentiful rain, which God has reserved to His inheritance" (Bernard of Clairvaux).60 In the chapter of the French Academie entitled, "Of the fertilitie caused by dewes and raine, and of the providence of God therein, ,,61 La Primaudaye preached how the earth waxed barren without rain from heaven; even so man could not perform anything if God did not dispense from on high his grace. 62 In Peri udropodias (1634), Tobias Whitaker characterized rain water as "light and concoctible, limpid and thin in respect of quality, sweet and grateful to the taste, and most proportionable to the best of waters." A commonly noted trait of rain water in this period was that it was subject to rapid putrefaction. 58 Bertholomeus de proprietatibus rerum, Bk. XIII, CLXXVI. 59Fulke, opp. Folio 50. 60Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon LI, p. 310. 61La Primaudaye, p. 751. 62Ibid., p. 754. Note also the influence of the Bible. Holy Scriptures speak of Jehovah or His influence as a shower strengthening and refreshing the plants and creatures on earth, Deut. 32:2; Psalms 71:6; Isaiah 55:10-11. See Heninger, p. 52. 59

There existed an implicit belief in some relation between the power to engender life and the factors of decay. After praising rain water, Whitaker added typically: But because rain water is an exhalation, although the thinnest part of all other waters extracted by the power of the sun as is evident; and bec ause of its universal collection and conmixture with ayre and clouds, which often times are infected and ill aspected, it is more easily disposed to putrefaction, and not thought fit to be used without correction, (that is to say) taken fresh boyled. 63 The belief in rain's superior virtue persisted in England at least to the end of the seventeenth century. Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, for example, was criticized on many counts, and among them was that his primitive, paradisiacal earth did not provide for rain. It was watered instead by rivers -rivers that flowed down from the north polar region towards the Torrid zone. Erasmus Warren, one of Burnet's theological critics, praised the hydrologic cycle for it resulted in rain. Rain saved men the "endless and unspeakable" trouble of having to cut ditches to bring the river water to the fields. But now kind Nature saves them from that labour, while Clouds do the work effectually for them. For they filling their Buckets by the help of the Sun, and then emptying the same to the best advantage; excuse them from the drudgery, by taking it upon themselves. 64 And moreover, Warren argued, when God compared Egypt with Palestine he preferred the latter "because in Egypt the Seed sown was watered with the foot as a garden of herbs; but Palestine was a land of hills and valleys, and drank water of the rain of heaven" (p. 148). To this Thomas Burnet replied that Egypt, though watered only by the Nile, was nevertheless likened to the Garden of the Lord in Genesis. The idea that rain water contributed more to the productivity of the land than river water was hardly tenable. The richness of the Nile Valley was too well known. In commenting on Burnet's answer to his 63 Tobias Whitaker, Peri udropodias, or a Discourse of Waters (London, 1634), pp. 66-68. 64Erasmus Warren, Geologica (London, 1690), p. 148. 60

criticism, Warren could only observe feebly that "a Land watered with Rivers and Showres at once may excel a Land watered with Rivers only. ,,65 In the Renaissance conception of the hydrologic cycle, vapours were thought to be drawn out of the earth; alternatively, they were described as having been removed from the earth and marshes (Caxton) or from the "waters and watry places" (Fulke). There lacked the idea that the sea contributed most of the moisture to the watering of the land. Even in the eighteenth century, John Ray (for example) thought that the rain over the continents came out of the vapours drawn from them. The dry earth, in other words, provided sufficient moisture for its own wateringby and large. The rivers represented a "surplusage" of water (Fig. 6, centre). They were not absolutely essential to the productivity of the earth except at a few unfortunate spots like Egypt. We may well be seeing here evidence of a lingering belief in the slightly inferior status of rivers. Another point of interest in John Ray's scheme of the hydrologic cycle is the way he associated the origin of the rivers with the sea. This too suggests the influence of an older view. For in the medieval and Renaissance conception the cycle that produced rain above the earth is often divorced from the cycle (the reversed hydrologic cycle) that produced fountains and rivers (Fig. 6, top). The earth is made fertile by both rain water and river water. Rivers are necessary to countries without adequate rain; and, moreover, they enhance the fertility of the flooded areas by the addition of silt transported from the mountains. 66 With this latter notion we stand at the edge of another problem, which is the relation between the maintenance of the earth's fertility and its final dissolution. Silt removed by rivers from the mountains and deposited in the valleys fertilize the valleys. But what would happen to the earth if this process were to continue indefinitely? John Ray considered this question briefly and toyed with the idea that the combined operation of erosion and deposition would lead to the levelling of the land masses. But he rejected it as the earth's final end in favour of consum65Warren, A Defence of the Discourse Concerning the Earth before the Flood (London, 1691), p. 53. 66John Ray, The Wisdom of God . . . (8th edition; London, 1722), p. 82. 61

mati on by fire, which had the support of the Bible. 67 The concern shown by Ray and his successors for the fertility of the earth, and, to a less extent, the manner of its final dissolution, echoes an ancient concern of Western man. It goes back to those Greeks and Romans who pondered over the question: is there evidence of decay in nature, of progressive decline in fertility? Has the earth lost its power of generation? The argument against nature's decay is relevant to our concern, for in the process of developing the case for the fertility of the earth, ideas related to the hydrologic and geologic cycles were introduced. Consider again Philo's argument, in De aeternitate mundi, for the continued fertility of the earth. Mankind may have declined but not the earth and its products, the plants and their fruits. Has the earth grown so old that it may be thought to have been sterilized by length of time? On the contrary it remains as it was ever young, because it is the fourth part of the All and is bound to remain undecayed in order to conserve the sum of things, just as also its sister elements, water, air and fire continue to defy old age. A clear proof that the earth retains its vigour continually and perpetually at its height is its vegetation, for purified either by the overflow of rivers, as they say is the case in Egypt, or by annual rains, it takes a respite and relaxation from the weary toil of bearing fruit, and then after this interval of rest recuperates its native force till it reaches its full strength and then begins again to bear fruits like the old and supplies in abundance to each kind of living creature such food as they need. 68 Thus Philo raised two points in defense of the earth's persistent fertility. One is the evidence of vegetation. "Weary toil" depletes the fertility of the earth, but after a respite and purified by annual rains or river water, it is able to bear fruit again. The other point is that the earth is "the fourth part of the All, " the other three being the sister elements of water, air, and fire. The maintenance of a balance among them by cyclic processes of transmutation means that none is subject to 67Ray, Miscellaneous Discourses, . " 68Philo, pp. 61-63. 62

(L ond on, 1692) , p . 50.

progressive decay. We must not suppose that the world is destroyed by transmutation, for there is a balance of powers in the interchange of the elements and such a balance produces unswerving stability and unshaken permanence, since it neither encroaches nor is encroached upon. And thus the reciprocation, the giving and taking of values, equalized according to the standards of proportion creates sound health and perpetual security. These things show the world to be everlasting [pp. 115-116]. The transmutation cycle, I have already suggested, may be seen as the antecedent and more inclusive form of the water cycle. Their points of similarity are evident: the cyclic changes of state, the idea of balance (which in the water cycle is expressed by the much noted phenomenon of the rivers running into the sea and yet the sea is not full), and the idea that the explanation for the fertility of the earth lies in the nature of the cycle. Rivers that flow over the earth fertilize it with material brought down from the mountains, as Ray believed, or purify it in Philo's more poetic conception. However, rivers and raindrops-given sufficient time-will also bring about the earth's dissolution. Philo as well as John Ray could see that the prolonged erosion of the land by water would end in the making of a level plain. Ray denied this vision in deference to Biblical teachingo Philo would have regarded the existence of such a denuded plain as an argument for the "Eternity of the World, " a thesis he wished to prove. But the land, as Philo could see, was far from even. The constant unevennesses and the great multitude of mountains with their vast heights soaring to heaven are indications that the earth is far from everlasting. For in the course of infinite time it would long ago . . . have under the rain-pour become an open, level road from end to end. For it is a natural characteristic of water that sometimes, particularly when it dashes down from a great height, it drives everything out before it by its force, sometimes by constant dripping it scoops out and hollows and so completely undermines the hardest and 63

stoniest ground quite as much as a digger would [po 119]. With these few words Philo expressed the essential geomorphological concept that, in the course of time, even a mountainous country would be reduced to an open surface by rain and river erosion. But there are in fact few examples of large and smooth surfaces of erosion on earth. Most of them show clear evidence of renewed dissection. Moreover, "constant unevenness" and "mountains with their vast heights" are still very prominent features of the terrestrial scene. The answer to the problem of the lack of large erosional surfaces is that the earth's crust is unstable; and that though mountains may decay through erosion, they are capable of renewed growth through uplift. It is of interest to note how Philo anticipated this answer. He pursued his argument for the "Eternity of the World" thus: 'The unevenness of the earth would no longer exist if the world was from everlasting.' Why so, my dear sirs? For others will come forward to say that trees and mountains differ not in nature. The trees shed their leaves at some seasons and then bloom again at others. . . . In the same way the mountains, too, have parts broken off but others come as accretions. But the accretions take long periods of time to become recognizable, because as the process of growth in trees is more rapid their advance is apprehended more quickly, while in mountains that process is slower, and, therefore, their aftergrowths become just perceptible only after a long time [pp. 133-134]. As to how mountains grow, when the fiery element enclosed in the earth is driven upward by the natural force of fire, it travels towards its proper place, and . . . it pulls up with it a large quantity of earthy stuff, as much as it can. . . . This earthy substance forced to travel with it for a long distance, rises to a great height and contracts and tapers, and passes finally into a pointed peak with the shape of fire for its pattern [po 135}. Notwithstanding the importance of Philo's influence on Christian writers, belief in the decay of nature remained very 64

much alive in the Christian tradition. It found expression in various guises at the beginning of modern Europe (A. D. 15001650). Martin Luther saw the world's decay in degenerative cycles. John Donne in his darker mood used nature's decay as a vehicle for literary expression. The most complete statement of the gloomy doctrine was, however, The Fall of Man (1616) by Godfrey Goodman, chaplain to the Queen. It called forth a vigorous rebuttal by George Hakewill. His book, Apologie, was an immediate success. First published in 1627, it reached a third and enlarged edition in 1635. It "almost immediately had repercussions at home and abroad. Discussion of the question became so popular that in the year following the book's appearance it was made the subject of a philosophical disputation at Cambridge. The respondent, who argued against the theory of decay, called upon Milton for aid, and the poet complied with a Latin poem entitled "Naturam non pati senium. ,,69 Hakewill himself emphasized the wide currency of the idea of nature's old age in his time. The opinion of the Worlds Decay is so generally received, not onely among the Vulgar, but of the Learned, both Divines and others, that the very commonnesse of it makes it current with many, without any further examination: That which is held, not onely by the multitude, but by the Learned, passing smoothly for the most part without any checke or controll.70 Hakewill appears to have believed that he was the first to undertake to combat the idea of nature's decay. I have walked (I confess) in an untrodden path, neither can I trace the prints of any footsteppes that have gone before mee, but onely as it led them to some other way, thwarting, and upon the by, not directly: some parts belonging to this discourse, some have slightly handled, none thoroughly considered of the whole [preface and p. 1]. Hakewill could justifiably claim to have been the first to handle the theme in comprehensive detail. However, the Apologie was 69Cited in R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1961), p. 36. 70Hakewill, An Apologie (Oxford, 1630), preface and p. 1. 65

distinguished less for the originality of its individual ideas than for the maturity of its scholarship: in the writing of it Hakewill appears to have consulted some six hundred authors. Philo was given as a reference. Indeed the two authors shared a basic outlook to the extent that both argued against the decay of the world. According to Philo, the earth continues to be fertile because it is only the "fourth part of the All, " and maintains a balance with the other three elements in cyclic transmutation. Hakewill, as we have noted, repeated this argument in the frontispiece declaration of the Apologie: " . . . the Elements, of which all sublunary bodies are composed, does so beget one the other, and are againe so begotten, each from the other; that while they seem to age they become immortall"71 (Fig. 5). Hakewill, however, was able to go a step beyond Philo in this particular line of reasoning: to the ancient idea of the transmutation of elements he added the related idea of the hydrologic cycle. Elements are shown to change from one to the other within the framework of water circulation. "God hath ordained this change. . . that the world might the better bee preserved for the commoditie of the beasts; but chiefly of men" (p. 140). The hydrologic cycle demonstrates the "providence and government" of God who will not allow the earth to undergo gradual decay until its final consummation by fire. Hakewill characterized the hydrologic cycle as follows: The world consists of the four Elements, one of which is the water, which at first was gathered in the Ocean, and thence dispersed into all parts of the world. Wherefore although all waters at the first doe flow from the Ocean; and besides, watry vapours are raised out of it by the perpetuall force of the Sun, and last of all some parts of the Ocean are changed into aire, yet it cannot thence come to pass, that the Ocean should be diminished. The reason is, because whatsoever is drawn and flowes from it, anon by the providence and government of God is restored and rendred, and flowes back againe unto it; the vapours also which ascend on high, are turned into raine, snow, and other Meteors, and at length return to the Sea; and though a great part of 7lIbid. (1635), frontispiece. 66

the Sea be turned into aire, that aire is againe turned into water, by which meanes that is repaid which is borrowed from the Sea . . . [po 140]. Circulation of water, both in the air and through subterranean passages, maintains the depth of "the mother of waters. " [The] great deepe hath undoubtedly lost nothing of her ancient bounds or depth, but what is impaired in one place, is again restored to her in another. The rivers which the earth sucked from her by secret veines, it renders back again with full mouth, and the vapours which the Sunne drawes up, empty themselves again into her bosome [po 140]. However, it is difficult to see how a cyclic scheme that maintains the level of the ocean is thereby also enabled to support the generative powers of the earth. Unlike later apologists (Ray, for example), Hakewill did not push the idea that rains and rivers, which he recognized as essential to the cyclic process, would, providentially, also maintain the earth's fertility. Philo thought that rains and rivers could "purify" the earth after "the weary toil of bearing fruit, " and thus prevent it from undergoing progressive decay. He did not, however, relate them to a water cycle. Hakewill recognized the role of rains and rivers in the water cycle but failed to present them as the agents that contributed to the earth's fertility. Instead, he chose to stress their destructive roles, how they were capable of levelling the land. This diminution then of the Mountains . . . is caused partly by Raine-water [quoting Job] and partly by Rivers, which by continuall fretting, by little and little wash away and eate out both the tops, and sides, and feete of Mountains: whence the parts thus fretted through by continuall falling downe, weare out the Mountains, and fill up the lower places of the valleyes, making the one to increase, as the other to decrease . . . [po 147]. Hakewill was much taken with the levelling of mountains and the filling of valleys. He cited Josephus Blancanus' De mundi fabrice and Ovid's Metamorphoses in support of his theme, and offered, in addition, architectural evidence. In the "whole globe of the earth, " nothing is lost. What the mountain loses is credited to the valley. 67

1 So some write of the triumphall Arch of Septimius, at the foote of the Capitoll mountaine in Rome, now almost covered with earth, insomuch as they are inforced to descend downe into it, by as many staires as formerly they were used to ascend; whereas contrariwise the Romane Capitoll it selfe seated on the mountaine which hangs over it (as witnesseth George Agricola) discovers its foundation plainely above ground, which without question was at the first laying thereof deepe rooted in the earth, whereby it appeares, that what the mountains looseth the valley gaines; and consequently that in the whole globe of the earth nothing is lost . . . . ,,72 Philo, we remember, also presented a rudimentary sketch of the denudational cycle. Hakewill's account sufficiently resembles it that we may be led to think that he had simply paraphrased his ancient precursor. There is, however, one significant detail missing in Hakewill's account. In arguing against the thesis of nature's decay, Philo introduced the idea that mountains also grew, that certain parts of the earth were being pushed up by "the natural force of fire." Hakewill appears to have entertained no such idea. He was hard pressed to answer his theological opponent, Godfrey Goodman, who did not see how the mountains, once worn down to "levell, " could be built up again. The process is irreversible. "Surely at length in a farre shorter time then eternity, they [the mountains] would be made levell, and so prove a bottome, and then you shall have them rich meadowes." To this criticism Hakewill could only suggest that vegetation decomposed into soil, and artfully gained a debater's point by turning his critic's favourable view of meadows to his account: That then wee shall have them rich meadows; Why my Lord what losse in this to the world? Nay what losse to the earth that instead of barren mountaines wee shall at length have fat and fruitful valleyes. 73 72Ibid. (1630), pp. 137-138. 73Ibid., Part II: An Answer to Foure Arguments . . . (1635), pp. 61-62. 68

Elsewhere Hakewill gave a vague answer based on analogy with the hydrologic cycle. As the Ocean is maintained by the returne of the rivers, which are drayned and derived from it: So is the earth by the dissolution and reversion of those bodies, which from it receive their growth and nourishment [po 149]. Another objection that Hakewill had to countenance was the strong evidence of decay in fertility in the Holy Land. But to Hakewill, this awkward fact raised no special difficulty and he believed he could offer a satisfactory answer. When I say, I compare these multitudes of men and cattell with the narrow bounds of that countrey; I am forced to beleeve that it was indeed a most fruitfull soyle . . . . Yet the reports of some who have taken a survey of it in these latter ages, beare us in hand, that the fruitfulness proceeded from a speciall favour of Almighty God towards this people . . . . Now then as this extraordinary fruitfulnesse proceeded from an extraordinary favour: so this favour ceaSing, the fruitfulnesse might likewise cease without any natural decay of the soyle. The country about Sodome and Gemorrha WaS for fruitfulnesse as the Paradice, a garden of the Lord, till the curse of God fell upon it, then it became a wast land, and so remaines to this day. . . . And if it be degenerated from its ancient fertility. . . I should rather impute it to the curse of God upon that accursed nation which possesseth it, or to their ill-manuring of the earth . . . then to any Natural decay in the goodnesse of the soyle [pp. 150-151].

Anthropocentric Teleology and Providence A major force behind the elaboration of the hydrologic cycle from the seventeenth century onwards was the belief that the configuration of the earth-no less than the motion of the starsmanifested the wisdom and providence of God. The interpretation of these divine attributes varied greatly in different ti mes and places. The Bible provided the authority; but the Bible was

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open to diverse and even contradictory readings. As an attribute of Jehovah, Providence limited itself almost exclusively to the welfare of a small group of people. On the other hand it can take on a much grander sense, that, for example, of order and fitness in nature as suggested by "the way of the eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon the rock, the way of a ship in the sea, and the way of a man with a maid" (Proverbs 30:19). Or its grandeur is manifest in austere impartiality: "He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 4: 45). The rebirth of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occurred at a time when the narrower interpretation of providence tended to be dominant. Writers have described its operation as though it served no other needs than those of man. Absurd delusions of human importance occur; perhaps the most extreme example is provided by the popular French author and naturalist, Bernardin de St. Pierre. The stripes on the melon, he believed, were providentially put there for the convenience of division into slices during family meals. 74 Philosophers who have expounded on the hydrologic cycle have not confined Providence to such absurdity. Thus the cycle may be taken as exemplifying the economy of natural processes in a world created by God; and uses aside, intrinsic beauty abides in cyclic motion. Nevertheless, from the seventeenth century onwards the constricted, man-centred understanding of providence would appear to be gaining ground at the expense of the more balanced interpretation of the Middle Ages. Or, to put it another way, the medieval model of the universe withstood the erosion of time and new ideas remarkably well; in spite of revolutionary discoveries in astronomy it lived in the literary imagination with little change until late in the seventeenth century. A feature of 74Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Etudes de la Nature (Paris, 1826), II, p. 376. As we may expect, Saint-Pierre brings in the hydrologic cycle to explain the seeming haphazard distribution of seas and gulfs. "Qu'on suppose, par example, . . . que la Mediterranee n'exist plus; que deviendront tant de fleuves de l'Europe, de l'Asie et de I 'Afrique , qui sont entretenus par les vapeurs qui s' e IElVent de cette mer, et qui rapportant leur eaux dans une proportion admirable, comme les calculs de plusieurs savans l'ont tres bien demontre?" (I, p. 141.) 70

the medieval model was the recognition of the smallness and impurity of the earth. From Cicero to Pierre Boistuau the insignificant body on which man lives has aroused contempt. C. S. Lewis gives several examples of the depreciation of the earth by authors from the Dark Ages like Chalcidius, Alanus ab Insulis, Macrobius, and Boethius. In contrast to the vainglorious optimism of some writers in the Age of Enlightenment, Chalcidius (fourth century A.D. ) wholly rejected the obsequious cosmos of Genesis in which the heavenly bodies were made "to give light upon the earth." He held it would be absurd to suppose that the eternal bodies above the Moon were ordered for the sake of perishable things below. Alanus saw man as "suburban, " far from the central castle in which the Emperor sat enthroned. Macrobius characterized the earth as a sort of cosmic dustbin containing the "offscourings of creation." For Boethius (430-524) the earth was a mere mathematical point. 75 To see the earth in such li'ght would release the thinker from any pressing need to analyze its apportionments for evidence of special favour to man. It must be admitted, however, that there was a strong man-centred, utilitarian streak in some of the apologetic writings of such early Christians as Mincius Felix, Lactantius, Origen, and even St. Basil. We should remember that these early Christian thinkers had to defend the rationality of their religion against the criticism of pagan philosophers; and one natural line of defence was to follow the accepted fashion which identified the utilitarian with the rational. Origen, for example, could slip on the respectable garb of Stoic doctrine and argue that the Creator has made everything to serve the rational being; we need dogs to guard our sheep, beasts to carry our baggage, and leopards to exercise our courage. 76 But, aside from the strain of apologetics the Church Fathers 1 vision of nature was not unduly iimited by utilitarian blinkers. With St. Augustine the anthropocentric bias was notably subdued; indeed he evinced such sensitivity to the beauties of nature and the world that they were to him a temptation, a temptation he could resist by reminding himself and others that 75C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). On Chalcidius, p. 55; Alanus, p. 58; Macrobius, p. 63; Boethius, p. 83 76S ee Glacken, p. 186. 0

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nature declared God's existence and glory. As to the providential character of the earth, St. Augustine wrote ". . . the heat which is disagreeable to them [to human beings] some animals find the most suitable conditions for a healthy life. ,,77 In a later period St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) noted in one of his sermons the providential arrangement of the reversed hydrologic cycle: that water appeared from hidden channels in the earth to become "visible once more to man and available for his service. ,,78 But he made the point largely to illustrate a spiritual lesson. To give one more example: In the Middle Ages a pressing problem was to explain the phrase in the Psalms which said that God established the earth above or on the waters. Various ideas were put forth; that the cause of the phenomenon was physical and mechanical, that it was due to the arbitrary exercise of God's will or that it was teleological. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1235-1253), presented a teleological argument inspired by the words of Genesis. "Truly it is a fact that, in order that the animals of this earth might have a habitation and a refuge, the water receded into the concave parts of the earth and the surface of the land appeared dry and distinct. ,,79 Ideas concerning the status of man in creation during the Middle Ages were modest in comparison with the form they eventually assumed from the time of the emergence of modern science. The Renaissance may be seen as a transitional period in the history of man-centred teleology. By the time of Elizabeth I, educated Englishman "did not doubt that the world and its contents had been made for man. ,,80 The New Astronomy displaced earth from the centre of the universe but paradoxically enthroned man, its tenant. No longer the suburbanite of Alanus, man moved to dwell in the central castle. The medieval and hierarchical Chain of Being still held; there was, however,

77 Augustine, City of God, translated by Marcus Dods ("Great Books of the Western World, " XVIII; Chicago, London. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), Bk. XII, Chapt. 4. 78Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon XIII, p. 67. 79 GIven In Wnght ,p. 187 . o

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80E . M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), p. 73. 72

a shift in the relative status of the segments. In the Middle Ages the upper links still commanded attention. Man and earth occupied the lowest place in an hierarchy that extended downward from God's throne. From the Renaissance onwards it was increasingly the lower links of the chain that really mattered. In the lower hierarchy man occupied the highest position. Parallel to this shift was the gradual disappearance of one meaning of mutual service and of the dignity of all members, including the humblest, in God's abounding creation. In its most exalted expression this was the service of disinterested charity towards non-rational beings. The Desert Fathers occasionally exemplified this attitude-St. Francis and his true disciples as a practice of daily living. Macarias the Alexandrian cured a young hyena of blindness. Theon used to mingle with the animals of the desert and give them drink. Sulpitius told of an old monk who fed a lion with dates, and of a she-wolf who regularly appeared to share a monk's meal. 81 And of course numerous stories of this kind were associated with St. Francis who in fact treated the ani mals as if they were rational; and who carried heterodoxy to the extent of shOWing courtesy even to the inanimate elements of nature. But we are describing here a marginal practice of Christianity; far more central and influential was the doctrine that man exercised rightful dominion over sublunary nature. From the time of the Renaissance onwards, however, not only the Franciscan ideal of charity but even the feudal ideal of service, based on a graded system of rights and obligations, weakened-to be replaced by modern values that were more anthropocentric and more narrowly utilitarian than they had been in the past. We can illustrate the shift in various ways: by noting, for example, the changes in wording and emphasis in the conception of an ordered and related universe. In the medieval image the Chain of Being Signified not only an unfaltering order but also a sympathetic universe where no part was superfluous, and therefore no part was without its unique dignity. A late expression of this attitude is discernible in the following lines: The noblest creatures need the vil'st on ground, The vil'st are served by the honour'd most. 81For attitude of desert hermits toward wild animals, see W. H. Mackean, Christian Monasticism in Egypt (London: S. P. C. K., 1920), p. 137. 73

And, which is more, the very heav'nly host Doth serve the basest creature void of sense Yet over-rule them in each clime and coast. (Davies of Hereford, Mirum in Modum, 1602)82 Peter Heylyn's Cosmographie was published only fifty years after the appearance of Davies of Hereford's Mirum in Modum. In it, however, was a passage on the ordered world which, notwithstanding certain vestigial expressions from an earlier time, exemplified the modern attitude in its human presumption. But nothing more sets forth the Power and Wisdom of Almighty God . . . than that most admirable intermixture of Want with Plenty, whereby he hath united all the parts of the World in a continuall Traffique and Commerce with one another; some Countries being destitute of those Commodities with which others abound, and being plentifull in those which the others want. Insomuch that as in the Body of man, that Microcosm. . . the Head cannot say that it has no need of the Foot, nor the Foot of the Hand, nor other members of the rest: so neither in the Body of the great World, can Europe say to Asia, or Spain to England, I have no need of your Commodities . . . . 83 Extreme anthropocentric beliefs found vivid expression in the seventeenth century. The bees were wonderfully organized but the chief thing was that they should "teach the art of order to a peopled kingdom." The sun itself was created to provide light to man, a not uncommon opinion in the Century of Genius that appears to have-in the words of Robert Boyle-"choque DesCartes." The French philosopher eschewed the extreme anthropocentrism of his time. The English chemist and theologian, Robert Boyle, tried to advance a middle position. What Des-Cartes says, that 'tis childish and absurd to think that God had created the Sun, which is many times bigger than the Earth, only to afford Light to Man . . . is somewhat invidiously propos'd; there being few able writers, that confine the Utility 82See Tillyard, p. 28. 83Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie in Four Bookes (London, 1652), p. 5. 74

of the Sun directly to the affording [of} Light to Man: and the littleness of his Bulk, ought not to make it thought absurd, that God may have had an especial Eye to his Welfare, in framing that bright globe. 84 In another part of the book Boyle asserted: "I see no Absurdity in supposing, that, among other Uses of the Sun, and of the Stars, the Service of Man might be intended" (p. 77). Robert Boyle also drew attention to the usefulness of floods and rains to man, particularly the Nile floods of Egypt and the rains in Europe. He did not, however, present these gifts of nature in the context of a hydrologic cycle, as did John Keill, John Ray, and a long succession of writers in the eighteenth and ear ly nineteenth centuries. From the seventeenth century onward literature that subscribed to the anthropocentric interpretation of the earth grew ever more effusive and profuse. We may now illustrate this trend by sampling the opinion of those writers who have contributed towards the elaboration and acceptance of the hydrologic cycle. George Hakewill put man at the centre of the world when he praised the sea-the mother of waters-not only for the cyclic constancy of its ebbs and flows, but for her "native saltness, & by reason thereof, her strength, for the better support of navigable vessels. ,,85 John Ray repeated this opinion almost word for word. He praised the sea for the regularity of its tidal motion, and for its "saltness, so convenient for the Maintenance of its Inhabitants, serving also the Uses of Man for Navigation, and the Convenience of Carriage, ,,86 Ray wavered between the broad and narrow meanings of Providence. On the one hand, we are asked to admire the intrinsic beauty and cleverness of God's creation as in the "incredible Smallness and Subtleness of some Animacules.·" Part of our business in Eternity, he presumed, was to "contemplate the Works of God, and to give him the glory of his Wisdom, Power, and Goodness, manifested in the Creation of them." On the other hand he stated in the table of contents that a purpose of the Discourse was to show 84Robert Boyle, A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (London, 1688), p. 28, 85Hakewill (1635), p. 141. 86Ray, The Wisdom of God . . . (1692), p. 72. 75

that the "World was in some Sense made for Man, " immediately adding, however, the qualifier "yet not so as to have no other End or Use of its Creation but to serve him. ,,87 Ambivalence in the interpretation of Providence also appears in John Woodward's An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth. The narrow view sees the earth, in spite of its catastrophic history and apparent disorder, as designed for man. Though the whole series of this extraordinary catastrophe may seem at first view to exhibit nothing but tumult and dis order, and nothing but hurry, jarring, and distraction of things; yet if we draw somewhat nearer, and take a closer prospect of it, if we look into its retired movement and latent springs, we may there trace out a steady hand producing good out of evil, the most consummate order and beauty out of confusion and deformity, acting with the most excellent contrivance and wisdom throughout the whole course of this grand affair, and directing all the several steps and periods to an end, and that a most noble and excellent one, no less than the happiness of the whole race of mankind; the benefit and universal good of all the many generations of men which were to come after; which were to inhabit this earth, thus modelled anew, thus suited to their present condition and necessities. 88 This extract reads like a categorical affirmation of the earth as created especially for man; yet in another part of the book Woodward suggested a far broader interpretation of providence. After discussing the various ways through which the earth was watered, he affirmed: "That the final Cause of this Distribution of Water, in such Quantity, to all Parts of the Earth indifferently in Springs, Rivers, and Rain: and of this perpetual Circulation and Motion of it, is the Propagation of Bodyes, Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals, in a continued Succession" (p. 143). 87Ibid. (1722), pp. 169-170. 88John Woodward, An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodyes (London, 1723), pp. 94-95; first published, 1695. 76

William Whiston, a professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, gave a somewhat different reading on the "Use of the Earth" than either Ray or Woodward. First, like the medieval cosmologists he drew attention to the insignificance of the earth compared with other heavenly bodies, and asserted that the stars and planets were not created just for humans. Secondly, he believed that the "wise and careful Providence of God" was most clearly manifest in planetary motion, the orbits being either "truly circular, or not very different from the same." The earth itself has no special merit. On the contrary, as to the main Use of this Earth, 'tis to afford Habitation to a sinful and lapsed Race of Creatures, of small Abilities or Capacities at present, but of great Vices and Wickedness; and is esteemed, as far as appears, in its present Constitution so peculiarly and solely fit for them, that when they are gone, or their Dispositions and Faculties reform'd and improv'd, a better Scene of Nature, (a new Heaven, and a new Earth) is to be introduc'd, for such better and more noble Creatures. The old one, which now obtains, being in its present State, it seems, only a Sort of Prison or Confinement, which is to be our lot whilst we are sinful and miserable but no longer. 89 In the context of the hydrologic cycle, the bias towards man and land animals in the interpretation of Providence is evident in the emphasis on soil fertility: the large oceans and the mountains exist and are so placed as to ensure sufficient water to all the land. John Keill's explanation was eagerly adopted by Ray and his many followers. Edmund Halley, a contemporary, had shown little interest in the role of Providence and Final Causes in his scientific papers. His account of the hydrologic cycle, first published in 1693, was an unpolemical, scientific report, but he introduced one teleological notion that found much favour among those who wanted to see marks of God's wisdom and providence in the configuration of the earth. Halley wrote: This, if we may allow final Causes, seems to be the design of the Hills, that their Ridges being plac'd thro' the midst of the Continents, might serve, as it 89 William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth (London, 1725), p. 57; first published, 1696. 77

were, for Alembicks to distil fresh Water for the use of Man and Beast, and their heights to give a descent to those Streams to run gently, like so many Veins, of the Macrocosm to be more beneficial to the Creation. 90 John Keill used this comment of Halley's as an argument against Thomas Burnet's view of mountains as mere "ruines. " John Ray also endorsed Halley's view but chided him for his hesitation in assigning final causes. Across the Atlantic Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was a vigorous exponent of "geo-pious" sentiments. He too picked up Halley's off-hand reference to providential design and hurled it at "the vain colts of asses, that fain would be wise. " [They] have cavilled at the unequal surface of the earth, have opened against the mountains, as if they were superfluous excrescences; but. . . the sagacious Dr. Halley has observed, That the ridges of mountains being placed through the midst of their continents, do serve as alembics, to distill fresh water in vast quantities for the use of the world . . . . 91 Cotton Mather carried the idea of Providence to further extremes in the essay "Of Rain" which includes a summary of the hydrologic cycle. It has little claim to originality. Mather's ideas are mostly borrowed from John Ray and William Derham but of interest is his presentation. Ray was a distinguished botanist as well as a natural theologian. The anthropocentrism that coloured his more didactic writings took on gaudy hues in the works of less restrained popularizers. In the following passages from Mather, we see first a short statement of the hydrologic cycle, and then an optimistic picture of the availability of water, in the form of either rain or river (the Nile again), which illustrates the providence of God. The rain is water by the heat of the sun divided into very small and invisible parts; which ascending in the air, till it encounters with the cold, is by degrees 90Edmund' Halley, Miscellanea Curiosa (London, 1708), I, p. 11; first published, 1693. 91Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher (Charlestown, 1815), p. 105; first published, 1721. 78

condensed into clouds, and thence descends in drops. . , . Though the rain be much of it exhaled from the salt sea, yet by this natural distillation it is rendered fresh and drinkable to a degree, which hardly any artificial distillation has yet affected. The clouds are so carried about by the winds, as to be so equally dispersed, that no part of the earth wants convenient showers, unless when it pleases God, for the punishment of a sinful people, to withhold rain, by a special interposition of his providence: or, if any land wants rain, they have a supply some other way; as in the land of Egypt, where little rain falls, there is an abundant recompense made for that want, by the annual overflowing of the Nile. 92 The author would then seem to press his enthusias m for rain to the edge of absurdity: "The gradual falling of the rain by drops, is an admirable accomodation to water the earth. It is the best way imaginable. If it should fall in a continual stream, like a river, everything would be vastly incommoded with it. " Mather's enthusiasm, however, was not exceptional for his time. A contemporary in England, William Wollaston (16601724), printed in private his Religion of Nature Delineated in 1722, a year after Cotton Mather published his Christian Philosopher from which the above quotations were taken. Wollaston's book was well received once it became available to the public. Ten thousand copies were sold in a very few years; a sixth edition appeared in 1738. Wollaston was a moral philosopher and philologist. The references in his book to physical geography were slight in substance though boldly expressed, Wollaston's sketch of the hydrologic cycle, with its image of rain descending prOVidentially as though from a watering-pot, closely paralleled that of Cotton Mather in content and style. [It) appears I think plainly enough in the parts and model of the world, that there is a contrivance and a respect to certain ends. . . . Who can observe the vapors to ascend, especially from the sea, meet above the clouds, and fall again after condensation, and not understand this to be a kind of distillation in order to clear the water of its grosser salts, and 92 Mather , "Of Rain, " Essay XII, ibid., pp. 59-60. 79

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then by rains and dews to supply the fountains and rivers with fresh and wholsom liquor; to nourish the vegetables below by showers, which descend in drops as from a watering-pot upon a garden. . . . I say, who can do this, and not see a design, in such regular pieces, so nicely wrought, and so preserved? 93 One of the most popular quasi-scientific works published in the eighteenth century was Le Spectacle de la Nature by Abbe Noel-Antoine Pluche (1688-1761). Daniel Mornet, after an investigation of the catalogues of five hundred private libraries in France during the eighteenth century, concluded that in popularity Pluche's Le Spectacle de la Nature outstripped the works of Buffon, Voltaire, and Rousseau. 94 Its popularity in England may be judged by the appearance of an English translation in 1733, almost immediately after the first Paris edition, and it went into an eighth edition between 1753 and 1763. The language is blatantly teleologic and anthropocentric. The Author of Nature is seen as "ami qui paroit absent." We do not see him but we recognize his endless concern for us by his endless gifts. ''11 nous parle chaque instant pour des liberalites qui sont inepuisables, qui couvre tout la terre, & qui n'y font que pour nous. ,,95 The theme of the hydrologic cycle is given several times, each time to emphasize a different aspect of its service to man. But perhaps the following dialogue between the prior and the knight adequately summarizes the Abbe Pluche's attitude to nature in general, and to the hydrologic cycle in particular. Le Prieur: Monsieur, vous regardez sans doute avec un peu de chagrin ces nuages qui s 'amassent, & qui nous oteront, selon toutes les apparences, Ie plaisir de la promenade?

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Le Chevalier: La vue ne m'en paroit plus affligeante depuis que je connois leur destination. C 'est pour 93William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (London, 1738), p. 82; first published, 1722. 94Daniel Mornet, Les Sciences de la Nature en France au xvm e Siecle (Paris, 1911), p. 9. 95Abbe Noel-Antoine Pluche, Le Spectacle de la Nature (La Haye, 1739), I, p. xi. 80

remplir nos fontaines & nos rivieres que les vapeurs montent de la mer. J'aime voir tous ces gros nuages partir en diligence pour aller porter Ie rafrafchissement & la fertilite dans les provinces les plus eloignees. C 'est tres-reellement une commission dont ils acquittent. 96 In England, a work comparable in scope and popularity was Oliver Goldsmith's A History of the Earth and Animated Nature. An unoriginal compendium based to a large extent on Buffon (and to a less extent on Pluche), it is of no interest to the development of science but it is pertinent to the gauging of intellectual fashions in the eighteenth century. Goldsmith's Animated Nature was first published, shortly before his death, in 1774 in eight volumes. Each set cost two pounds and eight shillings, a price that would have deterred all buyers but wealthy bibliophiles and those with a keen interest in science But the work proved to be a success. Eventually it went through twenty-two editions, some corrected and expanded, the last appearing as late as 1876. 97 Animated Nature skirts the province of physical geography but it is in touching physical geography that Goldsmith appears most exercised over the question of God's providence, whether it is biased in favour of man. Typically, the question arose because of the great size of the oceans. Though the assemblage of waters diffused round our habitable globe is great, yet (he thought) "they are rendered subservient to the necessities and the conveniences of so little a being as man. " [But) if it should be asked whether they be made for him alone, the question is not easily resolved. Some philosophers have perceived so much analogy to man in the formation of the ocean, that they have not hesitated to assert its being made for him alone . . . . As to any objection from the ocean's occupying too large a share of the globe, they contend, that there could not have been a smaller surface employed to supply the earth with a due share of evaporation. 98

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96lbid. (Utrecht, 1736), Ill, p. 179. 97R. M. Wardle, Oliver Goldsmith (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1957), p. 286 0 980liver Goldsmith, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature (Philadelphia, 1795), I, p. 143; first published, 17740 81

On the other hand, some observe that multitudes of animals are concealed in the ocean, and but a small part of them are known; the rest, therefore, they fail not to say, were certainly made for their own benefit, and not for ours. How far either of these opinions be just, I will not presume to determine; but of this we are certain, that God has endowed us with abilities to turn this great extend of waters to our own advantage. He has made these things, perhaps, for other uses; but he has given us faculties to convert them to our own. . . . Let us then boldly affirm, that the earth, and all its wonders, are ours; since we are furnished with powers to force them into our service. . . . Indeed when I consider the human race as nature has formed them, there is but very little of the habitable globe that seems made for them. But, when I consider them as accumulating the experience of ages, in commanding the earth, there is nothing so great or so terrible [po 144]. Another popular compendium of science in the eighteenth century was that of John Wesley. Originally published in 1763 in two volumes, it met with quick success and was frequently reprinted. In the process of being worked up as new editions it expanded to five volumes. A Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation can lay no claim to originality. Wesley himself said that it was based largely on the Latin work of John Francis Buddaeus. He also quoted freely from the established works of such writers as Ray and Derham and many others, including Cotton Mather. In praise of water for its various services to man, Wesley wrote: If, from the earth, and the creatures that live upon it, we cast our eyes upon the water, we soon perceive that had it been more or less rarefied, it had not been so proper for the use of man. And who gave it that just configuration of parts and exact degree of motion, which makes it so fluent, and yet so strong as to carry and waft away the most enormous burdens? Who has instructed the rivers to run in so many winding streams through vast tracts of land, in order to water them the more plentifully? Then to disembogue themselves into the ocean, so making 82

it the common centre of commerce: and thence to return through the earth and air, to their fountain heads, in one perpetual circulation ?99 In this paragraph Wesley commends water in the accepted manner, for its uses to man, to commerce, and to the maintenance of the earth's productivity. The appraisal is occasionally given an eccentric twist. Thus Wesley claimed to see especial providence in the winding of the streams, for by such means the streams were enabled to water the vast tracts of land "more plentifully. " The writers we have noted so far were divines and popularizers of science. Their works expressed ambivalence towards the precise character of providence. None can be said to have held consistently to the narrow view. "The earth is made for the use of man and yet. . ." was the characteristic formulation. When we turn from popular writers like Mather, Pluche, Goldsmith, and Wesley to scholars who have Significantly added to our knowledge of the earth, we find that they too reveal an ambivalent attitude towards providence. A few examples suffice to illustrate it. James Hutton's Theory of the Earth is now widely regarded as a classic in geology in which modern ideas like uniformitarianism and the relation of stream patterns to landforms were forestalled or first given detailed expression. Published in book form in 1795 in a modest edition of only four or five hundred copies, it met with so little demand that it did not call for reprinting again until 1959-a fate in sharp contrast to such works as Pluche's Le Spectacle de la Nature and Wesley's A Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation. In Theory of the Earth, Hutton viewed the planet as proper habitat for all living creatures. The complexity of its surface configuration and its ceaseless activity, including the activity of water in circulation, are necessary to their accommodation. Where so many living creatures are to ply their respective powers, in pursuing the end for which they were intended, we are not to look for nature in a quiescent state; matter itself must be in motion, and the scenes of life a continued or repeated series

99Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation (New edition; London, 1809), IV, p. 43. 83

of agitations and events. 100 Hutton then proceeded to suggest that if we take a point of view broader than that of survival and utility, the Globe of this earth is evidently made for man. He alone, of all the beings which have life upon this body, enjoys the whole and every part; he alone is capable of kno.wing the nature of this world, which he thus possesses in virtue of his proper right; and he alone can make the knowledge of this system a source of pleasure, and the means of happiness [I, p. 4]. William Buckland (1784-1856), first Reader in geology at Oxford, exemplified the ambivalent attitude of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century towards providence. In his inaugural lecture he likened God to Omnipotent Architect who designed the earth for "the daily wants of its rational inhabitants. ,,101 To Buckland providential design was evident "not only at the moment in which he laid the first foundations of the earth, but also through the long series of shocks and destructive convulsions which he has caused subsequently to pass over it" (p. 12). In his Bridgewater Treatise the hydrologic cycle was given as an example of Design. The size of the oceans manifested it in that large oceans were necessary to the production of fertile soils for human use. This is an old story but Buckland went further in suggesting that metals also existed for human use. Their distribution and availability in the exposed parts of the earth's crust bore witness to Design that ensured the "essential conditions of the earth's habitability by civilized man." A less inflated view of man's importance, however, followed: I would in this, as in all other cases, be unwilling to press the theory of relation to the human race, so far as to contend that all the great geological phenomena we have been considering were conducted solely and exclusively with a view to the benefit of man. 102 100James Hutton, Th~ory of the Earth (New York: StechertHafner, 1959), I, p. 4; first published, 1795. 101William Buckland, Vindiciae Geologicae (Oxford, 1820), p. 12. 102Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy (London, 1836), p. 99. 84

Buckland's inaugural lecture was designed to show "that the study of geology has a tendency to confirm the evidence of natural religion." The Bridgewater treatises, including Buckland's, espoused a similar aim. The bias in favour of man in these ostensibly apologetic works does not therefore surprise. What does seem surprising is to see such strongly man-centred views appear in straight scientific treatises. For instance, Roderick Murchison'S The Silurian System carries no apologetic intent. It is a detailed, rather plodding, piece of historical geology. Nevertheless, at the end of Part I there is a ringing declaration on the lesson to be gained from studying the history of the earth. Such study "convinces us that every variation of [the earth's] surface has been but a step towards the accomplishment of one great end, " which was to fashion the earth "into a fit abode for Man by the ordinances of Infinite Wisdom. ,,103

103Roderick Murchison, The Silurian System (London, 1839), p. 575. 85

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CHAPTER III

THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE: BURNET TO GUYOT

At the opening of the eighteenth century John Ray was able to present the hydrologic cycle as a unifying concept which brought under it a remarkable range of facts. In spite of weaknesses now obvious to us, we may admire the intellectual structure for its coherence and scale, characteristics that stand in sharp contrast to the fragmented physical geography of twentieth-century scholarship. The structure was not original with Ray although he had contributed to it. To trace the evolution of this structure to its multifarious roots would mean the retelling of a substantial segment of Western intellectual history, going back indeed to the cosmologies and cyclic notions of the Greeks and the Hebrews. This I have not been able to do. Instead, in the second part of this essay I have tried to block in some of the cultural and intellectual attitudes out of which (and in response to which) the concept of the hydrologic cycle evolved until it took the form given by Ray. We may now discuss the immediate cause of the renewed interest in the hydrologic cycle at the end of the seventeenth century, trace the development of this physico-theological idea in relation to the new findings of science, and demonstrate its persistence well into the Victorian era as a stubbornly reiterated cliche.

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The Burnet-Keill Controversy The immediate cause of the renewed interest in the hydrologic cycle was the publication of Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth in English in 1684 (Fig. 7). Educated at Cambridge at a time when Cambridge was dominated by Neoplatonism, it came as a shock to Burnet (when he was visiting the Alps) to see Nature not clothed in that geometric beauty, harmony of plan and restraint he had learned to expect. The Sacred Theory was an attempt to use the teaching of old theology 86

Fig. 7.

Thomas Burnet in Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684).

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and new science to explain the "multifarious Confusion." Three major irregularities offended Burnet's sense of order: (1) The distribution and shape of land and water. "Our Earth is . . . divided into Sea and Land, without any Regularity in the Portions . . . . Islands [lie] scatter'd like Limbs torn from the rest of the Body; great Rocks stand rear'd up in the Waters; the Promontories and Capes shoot into the Sea, and the Sinus's and Creeks on the other hand run as much into the Land; and these without any Order or Uniformity." (2) The subterranean caverns, the "inward parts" of the Earth which "are generally broken or hollow, especially about the Mountains and high Lands." (3) The mountains, like the Alps Burnet had seen, and others which together "would take up a very considerable part of the dry Land." The rest of physical features-the "Lesser Hills, Valleys, Plains, Lakes and Marshes, Sands and Desarts "-are "also without any regular Disposition. ,,1 The circle is a most convenient hieroglyphic for the wisdom of God. Before the seventeenth century the circular motion of the planets was widely and confidently taken to exhibit this wisdom. But what of the earth? It is round. And "wherfor God made the world al round?" The answer in William Caxton's words was: God fourmed the world al round; ffor of all the formes that be, of what dyuerse maners they be, may none be so plenere ne resseyue somoche by nature as may the figure rounde. 2 There remained the problem of mountains and valleys. However, according to Caxton, "neytha montayne ne valeys, how somever hye ne depe it be, taketh not away fro therthe his roundenesse, no more than the galle chestnut leueth to be rounde for his prickis" (p. 57). The device for seeing roundness where none in fact existed in perfection was ingenious: if you "mounte hye in thayr" all the great mountains and deep valleys should no more detract from the earth's roundness than a man's hair on an apple! 1Thomas Burnet, The Theory of the Earth (London, 1684), Bk. I, pp. 148-149. 2William Caxton, Mirrour of the World, edited by Oliver H. Prior (Extra Series CX [London: Early English Text Society, 1913]), p. 58; first published, 1481. 88

In the seventeenth century the literary and popular conception of the universe-still the medieval one of immutable heavens and circular orbits-was severely jarred under the impact of the new astronomy. The lack of geometric beauty in the shape of the earth became more evident than ever. Burnet was not alone in decrying its irregularities. John Donne asked, "But keepes the earth her round proportion still?" Mountains and valleys were like "warts" and "pock-holes" on it. Obviously, ''beauties best, proportion, is dead. ,,3 "Tis not, " Andrew Marvell observed, "what once it was, the World." It is now "But a rude heap together hurl'd;/ All negligently overthrown, / Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices, Stone. ,,4 A scientist of the eminence of Robert Hooke voiced similar belief: For I have very good Reason to believe, that there has been times of the Earth wherein it has had a much smoother and softer, and more succous Skin than now it hath, when it more abounded with spirituous Substances, when all the Powers were more strong and vegete, and when those Scars, Roughness and Stiffness were not in being. . . . 5 What could have marred the original harmony of shape and brought on the scars and roughness? The poets had no answer. Hooke suggested earthquakes and water erosion in the context of the theory that the earth was grOwing old and less fertile. But the most imaginative answer-one that at first aroused the greatest of interest and, later, controversy-was that of Burnet. The earth, according to Burnet, once had the beauty of "Youth and blooming Nature, fresh and fruitful." Not a wrinkle or scar marred its body. Even the air was calm. But this "innocency of Nature, " this smooth, Ante-deluvian globe was visited by sin and so had to be demolished. Divine Providence therefore caused the frames of the smooth earth to break, and fall into the water-filled "Great Abysse. ,,6 Consider, then, the 3John Donne, The First Anniversary (1612), lines 285-306. 4Andrew Marvell, "Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax" (ca. 1651), LXXXXVI. TRobert Hooke, A Discourse of the Causes of Earthquakes, July 1699, in The Posthumous Works of Dr. Robert Hooke, edited by Richard Waller (London, 1705). 6 Burnet , pp. 68-69. 89

consequences of the disaster, one transient and the other permanent. First, an universal Deluge would overflow all the parts and Regions of the broken Earth, during the great commotion and agitation of the Abysse, by the violent fall of the Earth into it. This would be the first and unquestionable effect of this dissolution, and all that World would be destroyed. Then when the agitation of the Abysse was assuag'd, and the Waters by degrees were retir'd into their Channels, and the dry land appear'd, you would see the true image of the present Earth in the ruines of the first. The surface of the Globe would be divided into Land and Sea; the Land would consist of Plains and Valleys and Mountains, according as the pieces of this ruine were plac'd and dispos'd [po 69]. Burnet wrote clearly and extremely well. The clarity of his text was enhanced by simple diagrams. In the period from 1685 to 1715 nearly all the worthies of theology and science in England expressed themselves on Burnet's theories. The decade following the publication of the first (the Latin) edition of the Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681) was one in which Burnet's work received wide acclaim and earned him many honours. But from 1690 onwards it was subjected to stringent and mounting criticisms from both theologians and natural philosophers. Some of the more acute of these criticisms were made by the mathematician John Keill. In trying to dismantle Burnet's cosmogony and geological history, Keill introduced and restated several ideas that were later incorporated by John Ray. These ideas eventually became, through constant repetition and embroidery, a stock concept that served to explain so well the fitness of the earth for human habitation. Burnet envisaged a primitive and innocent earth without deformities. It had neither seas nor mountains and valleys. But how could such an earth be watered? How could Fountains rise, or Rivers flow in an Earth of that Form and Nature? We have shut up the Sea with thick walls on every side . . . and we have remov'd all the Hills and the Mountains where the Springs use to rise, and from whence the Rivers descend to water the face of the ground: And lastly, 90

we have left. . . no Ocean to receive them [Bk. II, p. 223]. Such an earth would more likely be a barren wilderness than paradisiacal. Burnet confessed that this was the most problematical part of his theory. Moreover, he had imbibed the common opinion of the philosophers that all rivers rose from the sea and returned to it. His primitive earth had no sea; it was locked up in the abyss by the earth's crust. But this awkward blockage led Burnet to reflect on what he considered to be a more modern and solid opinion on the origin of springs and rivers: that they rose chiefly from rains and melted snows, not from the sea. And as soon as I had undeceiv'd my self in that particular, I see it was necessary to consider, and examine how the Rains fell in that first Earth, to understand what the state of their Waters and Rivers would be [po 224]. Burnet then proceeded to describe a fantastic system of air and vapour circulation over the primitive earth. It was in fact the hydrologic cycle on a grand hemispherical scale. Two simple diagrams appear in Burnet's book to illustrate his main thesis. One shows the movement of vapours; these are sucked out by the sun from the equatorial belt and made to drift towards the poles where they are condensed. The other diagram shows how the waters thus produced then feed the streams that flow back towards the equator (Fig. 8). What Burnet lacked in scientific knowledge he made up by imagination. He had, moreover, the literary skills with which to impart a semblance of reality to an imagined world. His conception of the hydrologic cycle is worth recapitulating in some detail for its novelty as well as for the controversy it aroused. First, there was the problem of "watery Meteors." Burnet believed that the earth was at first soft and moist, but that as it grew more dry, the "Rays of the Sun would pierce more deep into it, and reach at length the great Abysse which lay underneath, and was an unexhausted source of new vapours" (p. 224). What course would the vapours take? How could they condense, "there being no Mountains at that time, nor contrary Winds, nor any such causes to stop them or compress them?" Burnet answered as follows. And as the heat of the Sun was chiefly towards the middle parts of the Earth, so the copious Vapours 91

B o-OJc . 2 1(.

Fig. 8. The hydrologic cycle according to Thomas Burnet. Top: The River in the Air; vapours rise from the Torrid zone and move to the Pole where they are distilled. Bottom: Streams from the Pole move to the Torrid zone , bifurcating in the process; the Torrid zone itself is utterly sterile and effectively separates the two hemispheres. 92

rais'd there were most rarified and agitated; and being once in the open Air, their course would be that way where they found the least resistance to their motion; and that would certainly be towards the Poles . . . . For East and West they would meet with . . . Vapours as agitated as themselves . • . . But towards the North and the South, they would find a more easie passage, the Cold of those parts . . . making way to their motion and dilatation without much resistance. So. . . the Vapours of that Earth, which were rais'd chiefly about the Aequinoctial and middle parts of it, would be towards the extream parts of it, or towards the Poles. And in consequence of this, when these Vapours were arriv'd in those cooler parts of the Air, they would be condens'd into Rain. . . rp. 225]. This was the hydrologic cycle, "the establisht order of Nature in that Ante-diluvian World . . . . " Springs and rivers were not fed by subterranean channels connected with an open sea. Over the primitive earth, all . . . Waters came from above, and that with a. constant supply and circulation. Aristotle, I remember, in his Meteors speaking of the course of the Vapours, saith, there is a River in the Air, constantly flOWing betwixt the Heavens and the Earth, made by the ascending and descending Vapours; This was more remarkably true in the Primitive Earth, where the state of Nature was more constant and regular; there was indeed an uninterrupted flood of Vapours rising in one Region of the Earth, and flowing to another, and there continually distilling in Dews and Rain, which made this Aereal River [po 226]. Another major difficulty confronted Burnet: "How these Waters would flow upon the even surface of the Earth, or form themselves into Rivers. The answer he gave must now seem fantastic: the original earth was not perfectly spherical but oval, the polar parts being a little further from the centre than the equatorial. With such a shape the waters that fell over the polar regions would have a continual descent towards the equator, and thus complete the hemispherical hydrologic cycle (po 228). 0

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Tis true, these derivations of the Waters at first would be very irregular and diffuse, till the Chanels were a little worn and hollowed. . . . The Current indeed would be easie and gentle all along, and if it chanc'd some places to rest or be stopt, it would spread it self into a pleasant Lake, till by fresh supplies it had rais'd its Waters so high, as to overflow and break loose again; then it would pursue its way, with many other Rivers its companions, through all the temperate Climates, as far as the Torrid Zone [po 229]. As the rivers moved towards the Torrid Zone they would begin to bifurcate through the steady loss of water, and eventually disappear altogether in the dry sand. The Ancients, said Thomas Burnet, generally accounted the Torrid Zone as uninhabitable. They were wrong for the earth of their time; but the Torrid Zone of the first earth was indeed uninhabitable and utterly impassable because of the heat. However, the pri mitive Torrid Zone-though hotter than the present one-was also narrower, for another idea of Burnet's was that the axis of the primitive earth was not tilted the way it is now (pp. 240-242). Except for the narrow Torrid Zone that divided the globe into two hemispheres, the primitive earth was paradisiacal: luxuriant in vegetation, well-watered, and seasonless. It enjoyed "perpetual Spring, the Fields always green, the Flowers always fresh, and the Trees always cover'd with Leaves and Fruit" (p. 243). Churchmen attacked Burnet for his unorthodox use of the Scripture. More importantly Burnet's theory was attacked for its wayward esthetics and false science. In 1690 Erasmus Warren, Rector of Worlington, sharply criticized Burnet's ideas in a book called Geologica. "Has not this Earth, " Warren asked, "as much to shew for its being made by Rule and Measure, as another of a pretended different Form, could have had?" But when it came to finding uses for the present earth's system of mountains and seas, Warren showed a singular lack of imagination. The seas are useful, for now a great part of Mankind live by the Seas, either in way of Traffick or Navigation: not to say that all are some way or other the better for them. . . . Mountains also now are most eminently serviceable; That is to say, in Bounding Nations; in 94

Dividing Kingdoms; in Deriving Rivers; in Yielding Minerals; and in breeding and harbouring innumerable wild Creatures. 7 Thomas Burnet could more or less reply to the esthetic objections of Erasmus Warren and to other critics as ignorant of science as Burnet himself; but the precise objections raised by the Cambridge mathematician, John Keill, were quite another matter. Burnet, Keill quickly pointed out, never did explain how a sealess earth could supply moisture to the air and, eventually, to the earth. And seeing the Sea as it is now laid open to the action of the Sun, is but just sufficient to supply us with Rain and Vapours; does it not seem a thing against common sense to suppose that the Abyss inclos'd with a thick shell could have sent out a quantity of Vapours great enough for such an effect?8 But these were words. Keill was eager to reduce the matter to calculation. In Burnet's first earth, there must have been some way or ways by which the sun's rays could penetrate the crust and draw vapours out of the abyss. Perhaps there were pores and cracks in the crust? If we allow'd the mouths of all the Pores, Cracks and Chaps, thro' which the Sun must have acted on the Abyss to have been 1/10,000 part of the Earth's surface; there would then have been five thousand times less Vapours to have serv'd twice as great a quantity of dry Land; and therefore that in a Country as bigg as Britain, there would not have been so much as one River . . . [po 68]. Thus Burnet's sealess earth, far from being the lush Eden he envisaged, "would be nothing else but a Desart, " according to Keill. With the sea, half of the earth is uninhabitable by man, but without it the entire earth would be lifeless. Another point remained to be answered. Could not the Abyss supply water to the springs and rivers through subterranean channels? Burnet himself denied this possibility for his primitive earth, 7Erasmus Warren, Geologica (London, 1690), p. 147. 8 John Keill, An Examination of the Reflections on the Theory of the Earth (Oxford, 1699), p. 68. 95

confident as he was of his special device for vapour and water circulation above the earth. Both Woodward and Whiston believed that water from the Abyss contributed significantly to surface flow. Keill, however, was of the opinion that, given the present size of the seas, "a superior circulation of Vapours drawn from the Sea by the heat of the Sun" provided sufficient means. For it is certain that nature never provides two distinct ways to produce the same effect, when one will serve. But the increase and decrease of Rivers, according to wet and dry Seasons of the year, do sufficiently show their Origination from a Superior circulation of Rains and Vapours. For if they were furnished by Vapours exhaled from the Abyss through subterraneous Pipes and Channels, I see no reason why this subterraneous fire, which always acts equally, should not always equally produce the same effect in dry weather that it does in wet. 9 Keill dismantled Burnet's theory by incisively demonstrating that one of the major (so-called) deformities of the present earth-the seas-was in fact necessary to the maintenance of fertility. The other major deformity in Burnet's view was the confusion of mountains. Keill's defence of mountains lacked the originality and force of his defence of the seas. He appealed to the authority of the "Learned and Ingenious Mathematician and Philosopher Mr. Edmund Halley" (p. 47). Mountains are capable of condensing vapours by offering them "resistance." Mountains are "absolutely necessary for the subsistence of Mankind." Without them, even if there were water it would ''without doubt. . . stagnate and stink, for how is it possible for water to run where there is no rising ground" (p. 49). On a smooth regular earth there could be no rivers. And the great advantages, Which Countries reap by being well furnished with Rivers, is very evident; for without them there could be no great Towns, nor any converse with far inland Countries; 9Keill, An Examination of Dr. Burnet's Theory of the Earth, with some Remarks on Mr. Whiston's New Theory of the Earth (2nd edition; London, 1734), p. 148. 96

since without them it is almost impossible to supply a vast multitude of People with things necessary for life [po 50]. The triumph of Keill over Burnet vindicated the concept of the hydrologic cycle; in an expanded form it succeeded in providing a sense of order to the apparent confusion of land and sea, mountains and valleys, a confusion that jarred on Burnet's sensibilities. One consequence of the success of the concept was a tendency to exaggerate the extent of fertile, well-watered land. Thus Keill appears to have believed that the land had few barren places. In attempting to calculate the amount of water the ocean received from the rivers, he used data from the River Po and assumed that the Lombardy plain represented the average moisture condition of dry land. Possible objections were forestalled by asserting: "It is true, there are in the Earth some barren places which have no great quantity of water or Rivers in them, but they being but small will not much alter our account" (p. 128).

Richard Bentley's Eighth Boyle Lecture The main personalities of the debate on the nature of the earth, insofar as it was scientific rather than esthetic or exegetical, were Burnet and Keill; but we should acknowledge the remarkable insights of a contemporary, Richard Bentley. In 1692, when Bentley was a young man and only in deacon's orders, he received the unusual honour of being asked to deliver the first series of the Robert Boyle lectures. His subject was "A Confutation of Atheism." In the first five discourses Bentley argued for the existence of a provident God from the human soul and body. In the last three he argued from "the origin and frame of the world." For the historian of ideas these have a peculiar interest because they were read by Newton and had his approval. But for us the last lecture itself merits special attention because in it Bentley examined the problem of the size of oceans and the existence of mountains. Let us consider the ample provision of Waters. . . . Though some have grudged the great share that it takes of the Surface of the Earth, yet we shall propose this too, as a conspicuous mark and character of the Wisdom of God. We dare venture to 97

affirm, that these copious Stores of Waters are no more than necessary for the present constitution of our Globe . . . . For is not an immense quantity of it continually exhaled by the Sun, to fill the Atmosphere with Vapours and Clouds, and feed the Plants of the Earth with the balm of Dews and the fatness of Showers ?10 The large surface of water is necessary to maintain balance between the amount removed by wind and sun and the amount delivered to it by rivers. For it's evident and necessary, if we follow the most fair and probable Hypothesis, that the Origin of Fountains is from Vapors and Rain, that the Receptacle of Waters, into which the mouths of all these Rivers must empty themselves, ought to have so spacious a Surface, that as much Water may be continually brushed off by the Winds and exhaled by the Sun, as (besides what falls again in Showers upon its own Surface) is brought into it by all the Rivers [PP. 30-31].

With these considerations in mind, how rash. . . and vain are those busy Projectors in Speculation, that imagin they could recover to the World many new and noble Countries . . . without any damage to the old ones, could this same Mass of the Ocean be lodged and circumscribed in a much deeper Channel and within narrower Shores! For by how much they would diminish the present extent of the Sea, so much they would impair the Fertility and Fountains and Rivers of the Earth: because the quantity of Vapors, that must be exhaled to supply all these, would be lessened proportionally to the bounds of the Ocean; for the Vapors are not to be measured from the bulk of the Water but from the Space of the Surface. So that this also doth inferr the superlative Wisdom and Goodness of God [pp. 31-32J.

10 Richard Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism, from the Origin and Frame of the World (London, 1693), p. 29.

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These arguments are familiar because we have already encountered them in Keill's criticism of Thomas Burnet. In priority of publication however the honour goes to Richard Bentley who first developed the argument in favour of large seas in his Boyle sermon preached at St. Mary-Ie-Bow on December 5th, 1692. The sermon appeared in print the following year. Both Keill and Ray could have had easy access to the sermon, but if so, neither acknowledged their debt to Richard Bentley when they expounded similar views in 1698 and 1701 respectively. Ray credited the insight to Keill, and Keill was silent as to his source. 11 It seems clear that in the last sermon, Bentley was controverting the views of Thomas Burnet, although Burnet was not specified by name. The shafts of criticism were levelled instead at the "busy Projectors in Speculation." At that time, however, Burnet was by far the most famous of the speculators. In one sermon Bentley sought to confound those who "are out of Love with the features and meen of our Earth." Against them he argued for the need of large surfaces of water, for the need of turbulent processes in nature, and for a less purely geometric conception of beauty. We have already presented his first argument which forestalled that of John Keill. On the necessity of turbulent processes and their inevitable effect on surface configuration, Bentley wrote: For supposing the Existence of Sea and Mountains; if the Banks of that Sea must never be jagged and torn by the impetuous assaults or the silent underminings of Waves; if violent Rains and Tempest must not wash down the Earth and Gravel from the tops of some of those Mountains, and expose their naked Ribbs to the face of the Sun; if the Seeds of subterranean Minerals must not ferment, and sometimes cause Earthquakes and furious eruptions of Volcano's, and tumble down broken Rocks, and lay them in confusion: then either all things must have lIIt seems unlikely that Bentley could have got his idea from Keill. Although Bentley was a young man of just over thirty years at the time of the sermon, Keill the mathematician was even younger-a student twenty years of age at Balliol College, Oxford. 99

been over-ruled miraculously by the immediate interposition of God without any mechanical Affections or settled Laws of Nature, or else the body of the Earth must have been as fixed as God or as hard as Adamant and wholly unfit for Our habitation. 12 As to calling an irregular surface deformed and ugly, Bentley pointed out the arbitrariness of the judgment and the complete neglect of the propriety of a shape to' its nature and function. There is no Universal Reason. . . that a Figure by us called Regular . . . is absolutely more beautiful than any irregular one. All Pulchritude is relative; and all Bodies are truly and physically beautiful under all possible Shapes and Proportions; that are good in their Kind, that are fit for their proper uses and ends of their Natures. We ought not then to believe . . . that the Mountains are mishapen, because they are not exact Pyramids or Cones . . . . Let them consider, that these Ranges of barren Mountains by condensing the Vapors and producing Rains and Fountains and Rivers, give the very Plains and Valleys themselves that fertility they boast of. . . . Who would part with these Solid and Substantial Blessings for the little fantastical pleasantness of a smooth uniform Convexity and Rotundity of a Globe? [Po 37. J

Stimulus from Halley Criticism of Burnet's theory was not all negative. To take effect it must be supported by an alternative interpretation. Against the view that the present earth is chaotic, one needs to offer a concept that discerns order in the seeming confusion. Arguments must be gathered to show that not only the antediluvian earth displayed the wisdom of God but the present one also This saving concept was the hydrologic cycle. Loosely stated it is of ancient origin; but, although the concept is vitally concerned with water in all its forms and with the movements o

12Bentley, pp. 35-36.

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of water, its scientific elaboration from the Renaissance to the end of the seventeenth century was slow, and appears to have been little affected (at least directly) by contemporaneous achievements in hydraulic engineering and in quantitative hydrology first in Italy, then in France. In England the concept of the hydrologic cycle did gain new impetus from the technical writings of Edmund Halley. Halley avoided questions of teleology, except for the almost whimsical attribution of Final Causes to the formation of mountains; his study on vapour transfer and the water cycle, however, found favour with the scientific critics of Burnet. Both Keill and Ray exploited Halley's research for their own didactic purposes. Armed with Halley's facts and the conclusions that can be drawn from them, they were able to demolish the image of an earth in ruin, and build up in its place an earth that is fully compatible with the present providence of God. We recall that during the Renaissance the ability of the sun's heat to draw up vapours from the watery surfaces of the earth was well known. In Caxton's Mirrour of the World (1481) attention was directed to specific, incontrovertible cases of this phenomenon: for example, the drying up of wet cloth in the air. William Fulke argued in 1563 for the reality of evaporation by claiming that if water were left in a hard smooth basin of stone in the sun it would soon dry up. However, nobody appears to have bothered to perform a simple experiment to determine the loss numerically. As Halley reminded the Royal Society in 1687, that the quantity of aqueous Vapours contained in the Medium of the Air, is very considerable, seems most evident from the great Rains and Snows which are sometimes observed to fall . . . but in what proportion these Vapours rise. . . has not, that I know of, been any where examined, tho it seem to be one of the most necessary Ingredients of a real and philosophical meteorology. . . . 13

13Edmund Halley, "An Estimate of the Quantity of Vapour raised out of the Sea by the warmth of the Sun; derived from an Experiment shown before the Royal Society, . . ," Philosophical Trans. Royal Society, XVI, No. 189 (1687), 366, 101

Halley's conception of the hydrologic cycle appeared in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions for 1691. It was distinguished from the many vague expressions that saw print both before and after his time in being based on experiment and calculations. It was probably also the most complete statement of the cycle thus far. In the following extracts, Halley first described the exchanges of vapours and water between the sea and the land; these motions were to become, in the course of the eighteenth century, the chief meaning of the hydrologic cycle. Later in the same paper Halley showed that he was well aware of other types of cyclic processes. Those Vapours . . . that are raised copiously in the Sea, and by the Winds are carried over the low Land to those Ridges of Mountains, are there compelled by the stream of the Air to mount up with it to the tops of the Mountains, where the Water presently precipitates, gleeting down by the Crannies of the stone; and part of the Vapour entring into the Caverns of the Hills, the Water thereof gathers as ill an Alembick into the Basins of stone it finds, which being once filled, all the overplus of Water that comes thither runs over by the lowest place, and breaking out by the sides of the Hills, forms single springs. 14 Mountain springs are the chief sources of such streams as the Rhine, the Rhone, the Danube, which latter one would hardly think the collection of Water condensed out of Vapour, unless we consider . . . that it is the sum of all those Springs which break out on the South side of the Carpathian Mountains, and on the North side of the immense Ridge of the Alps . . . . And it may almost pass for a Rule, that the Magnitude of a River . . . is proportionable to the length and height of the Ridges from whence its Fountains arise [po 471]. But the vapours blown inland and returned by the rivers into the seas constitute only a small portion of all the vapours 14Halley, "An Account of the Circulation of the watry Vapours of the Sea, and of the Cause of Springs . . . , ibid., for 1691, XVII, No. 192 (1693), 471. 102

extracted by the sun from the seas. "By much the greatest part of the whole Vapour, " according to Halley, was returned to the seas as dews and rains without ever touching land. And, moreover, some of the rain that falls over the sea may be derived from moisture carried by the winds from the land to the sea; although the land could only supply this moisture because it had previously been wetted by condensed sea vapours. This was the "third part" of the total amount evaporated from the seas. A third part falls on the lower Lands, and is the Pabulum of Plants, where yet it does not rest, but is again exhaled in Vapour by the Action of the Sun, and is either carried by the Winds to the Sea to fall in Rain or Dew there, or else to the Mountains to be there turned into Springs; and though this does not immediately come to pass, yet after several vicissitudes of rising in Vapour and falling in Rain or Dews, each particle of the Water is at length returned to the Sea from whence it came. Add to this that the Rain-waters, after the Earth is fully sated with moisture, does by the Valleys . . . find its way into the River, and so is compendiously sent back to the Sea. After this manner is the Circulation performed . . . [po 472]. The hydrologic cycle Halley described was one of remarkable complexity. John Ray was clearly indebted to it. A measure of Ray's independence of thought is that he did not accept Halley's thesis whole. Halley appears to have believed in some process of direct condensation on the slopes of mountains. Vapours may "precipitate" as water on the mountains and generate springs without passing through the form of rain. Halley claimed that this "Theory of Springs is not a bare Hypothesis, but founded on Experience, which it was my luck to gain in my abode at St. Helena, where in the Nighttime, on the tops of the Hills, about 800 Yards above the Sea, there was so strange a condensation, or rather precipitation of the Vapours, that it was a great Impediment to my Coelestial Observations. ,,15 Rayacknowledged this opinion to be "ingenious" but he himself believed that all springs and rivers proceeded from rain water. Ray too claimed the authority of personal experience. 15Halley , Miscellanea Curiosa (London, 1708), I, p. 9. 103

I myself have observed a Thunder-Cloud in passage, to have in less than two hours space poured down so much Water upon the earth, as besides what sunk into the parched and thirsty ground, and filled all Ditches and Ponds, caused a considerable Flood in the Rivers, setting all the Meadows on flote . . . . 16 We remember that Ray made a distinction between the rain that moistens the soil, thus making it productive, and the rain that causes rivers and floods. The former is due to the condensation of vapours that are exhaled out of dry land; the latter is caused by the condensation of "surplus" vapours which the Winds bring over the land from the great oceans. This scheme fits in well with Ray's conception of the Mosaic Deluge. To produce the Deluge vapours from the dry land itself obviously do not suffice. And since Ray has renounced the theory of collapse into a water-filled Abyss, the only adequate source of vapour and water is the ocean. So, having personally observed how a thundercloud can in less than two hours produce enough water to flood the meadows, he concluded that the Mosaic flood may be understood if ''by Winds, or whatever Means seem'd good to God" all the vapours from the ocean were brought together, and there "caused to distil down in Rain upon the Earth" (p. 69). A further difference between Ray and Halley is reflected in their views on the amount of vapour that is removed from the sea and returned again to the sea by rain and dew. Halley calculated a minimal figure for the "loss in Vapour" from the Mediterranean in a summer day, and it is 5,280 million tons. By contrast, the rivers return to the sea only 1, 827 million tons in the same period. 17 What has happened to the difference? Halley's answer is that a large part of the vapour removed from the sea during the day is returned to the sea "by the cool of the Night" as dew or rain (p. 10). Ray, on the other hand, saw the difference as being made up by water from the Ocean. Furthermore, he believed that winds can transport vapour over great distances, beyond the catchment area of the Mediterranean basin and into the Northern Countries.

16John Ray, Miscellaneous Discourses, Concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World (London, 1692), po 69. 17Halley, Miscellanea Curiosa, pp. 4-5. 104

If you proceed to ask what becomes of the Surplusage of the Water, which the Mediterranean receives from the Ocean, and spends in Vapour; I answer, It seems to me that it must be cast farther off over the Tops of the Mountains, and supply in part Rain to these Northern Countries; for we know that the South Wind brings Rain with us, and all Europe over 18 [Fig. 6, centre].

Relation to General Wind Circulation In Ecclesiastes the circulation of wind and the hydrologic cycle appear in subjacent verses. The intimate relation thus implied, however, was not explored by the numerous writers who sought out Ecclesiastes for authority and inspiration. The reason probably lies in the fact that the critical verse (1:7) was commonly interpreted as giving support to the concept of a subterranean cycle of water movement quite unrelated to the motions of the wind above ground. In Renaissance meteorology the dichotomy persisted between a subterranean cycle responsible for rivers and a superterranean cycle responsible for rains and dew; moreover, the superterranean cycle retained the essential, one-dimensional verticality of the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century far greater emphasis was placed on the horizontal displacement of air and of the vapours they carry. The ideas of Nathanael Carpenter and John Woodward, for example, on the role of winds in the transportation of vapour show great advance when compared with those of Renaissance meteorolOgists. Thus, on the relation of the humidity of the winds and their source regions, Carpenter wrote: Winde which bloweth from one Region to another . . . partaketh of a twofold qualitie; the one derived from the place whence it is ingendred; the other from the Region through which it passeth . . . our Easterne wind is found to be driest of all others, whereof no other cause can be given, then that it comes over a great Continent of land lying towards the East, out of which many drie & earthly exhalations are drawn: so the Westerne winde is observed to be very moist, 18Ray, Miscellaneous Discourses, . . . , p. 246.

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because it passeth over the huge Atlantick Ocean, which must needs cast forth many watrie and moist vapours, which beget raine and showres. 19 Carpenter in this passage appears to have approached closely to a full statement of the hydrologic cycle in which the twin concepts of wind and vapour circulations are synthesized. In fact Carpenter wrote outside the conceptual framework of the hydrologic cycle as we know it. His account of how "All Rivers have their first original1 from the Sea" was a species of the concept of subterranean circulation. 20 On the horizontal (as well as vertical) movements of winds and vapours, John Woodward expressed the belief that though the Quantity of Water . . . rising and falling be certain and constant as to the whole, yet it varies in the several Parts of the Globe; by reason that the Vapours float in the Atmosphere, sailing in Clouds from Place to Place, and are not restored down again in a Perpendicular upon the same precise Tract of Land, or Sea, or both together, from which Originally they arose, but any other indifferently. So that some Regions receive back more 19Nathanael Carpenter, Geography Delineated Forth in Two Bookes (Oxford, 1625), Bk. II, p, 32. 20Ibid., pp. 142-153. Carpenter gives a lengthy review of the various hypotheses on the origin of springs and rivers including that of the Church Father, based on Ecclesiastes 1, and that of Thomas Aquinas. On page 153, he offers his own rather curious version: "It will be expected at least that we should disclose our owne opinion, . . . First therefore, we will suppose as probable: that the earth is in a manner compassed round about with water [the reason being], the porous and spongy nature of the Earth, which is apt to drinke in the water of the sea, in the same light . . . as also from experience of Miners. [This subterranean water lies no higher than the level of the sea.] Now to know how the water thus naturally settled, is not with standing lifted up higher to become the source of springs, we must understand, that it comes to passe not onely by the heat of the sunne and starres, piercing farre under the superficies of the earth . . . But also to subterranean fires hid in the bowells of the earth, in many places. " 106

in Rain than they send up in Vapour: as, on the contrary, others send up more in Vapour than they receive in Rain. 21 At the opening of the eighteenth century the nature of the Burnet-Keill controversy required that the discourse between the adversaries be pursued in the context of a hydrologic cycle closely linked to notions of planetary wind circulation. It may be recalled that Burnet saw a meridional movement of wind and vapour. Winds carried the vapours from the torrid zone to the cold poles where they were distilled, and the distilled water then flowed back to the torrid zone. Keill, on the other hand, believed that winds moved primarily from east to west, and that the vapours they carried could not be carried very far before they were condensed into drops of rain. Notwithstanding these efforts, circulations of water and air have in the main been treated as separate entities. There was no lack of scientific interest in planetary wind movement in the later part of the seventeenth century. Such well known scholars as Bernhard Varenius, Robert Hooke, and Edmund Halley enriched the field. In 1686, before the Royal Society of London, Robert Hooke summarized his views on the exchange of air between polar and equatorial regions thus: From these Considerations . . . will follow a necessary motion or tendency of the lower Parts of the Air near the Earth, from the Polar Parts towards the Aequinoctial, and consequently of the higher Parts of the Air from the Aequinoctial Parts towards the Polar, and consequently a kind of Circulation of the Body of the Air, which I conceive to be the cause of many considerable Phaenomena of the Air, Winds and Waters. . . . 22 But it is the relation of the circulation of air to the "Phaenomena of the Air" and, in particular, to "Waters" that was left little explored. Halley, to give another prominent example among scientists, had written influential papers on both water and air dirculations, but made little of their relations. Theo-philosophical writers like Ray and Derham, popularizers 21John Woodward, An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodyes (3rd edition; London, 1732), p. 133. 22The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, p. 363. 107

like Mather, Goldsmith, and Wesley, have similarly neglected the connection between the two systems. As is the general run of mid-twentieth century textbooks on weather, "water" and "wind" are kept in separate chapters. Only the more sophisticated among modern writers stress the intimate relation between water balance, wind circulation, and other forms of energy exchange.

The Round Circuit and The Well-Watered Earth After John Ray, not much further insight was added to the concept of the hydrologic cycle for the next one hundred and fifty years. Indeed among the more didactic works of this period, what precision the concept had originally was (on occasion) blunted in the interest of rhetoric and in the effort to subsume under it an increasing burden of incompatible ideas and illsorted facts. It would serve no useful purpose to give lengthy extracts from the many works that used the cycle as a vehicle to order the seeming infelicities of the earth and thus commend the wisd'Jm of God. A sample, taken from writers of varying scientific capability and apologetic intent, suffices to impress upon us its persistent popularity. William Derham, Canon, F. R. S. William Derham was a contemporary of Ray's and wrote the preface to the third edition of Ray's Three Physico-Theological Discourses which appeared in 1713, seven years after the author's death. In 1713 Derham's own Physico-Theology was published. In the dedication to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Derham referred obliquely to his qualifications as a member of the Royal Society and a divine to do what he could "towards the Improvement of philosophical matters to Theological Uses." He disclaimed scholarship. "I drew up what I had to say, making it rather the diverting Exercises of my Leisure Hours, than more serious Theological Studies." Nevertheless Physico-Theology was a heavily documented book, the footnotes not infrequently exceeding the length of the text. Indebtedness to Ray is evident in the numerous references to him. Even more popular than Ray's Wisdom of God, Derham's Physico-Theology reached a twelfth edition by 1754, and was translated into French, Swedish, and German. Since its publication it became, according to Nicolson, one of the most

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popular "scientific It handbooks for two generations of poets. 23 The providential nature of the creation is clearly diagrammed by Derham in the list of contents. Under the heading, Atmosphere, for example, we find a schema that contains some of the more utilitarian properties of air and water circulation. The Atmosphere Composed of Air and Vapours Useful to Respiration and Animal Life Vegetation of Plants Conveyance of The Winged Tribes Sound The Functions of Nature Reflecting and Refracting Light Containing the Winds, which are of great Use and Necessity To the Salubrity and Pleasure of the Air In various Engines In Navigation Clouds and Rain: Of great Use to the Refreshment of the Earth and the Things therein Origine of Fountains, according to some As to the distribution of land and water Derham wrote, lIalthough it may seem rude and undesigned to a careless View, and is by some tax'd as such, yet is admirably well adjusted to the Uses and Conveniences of our World. II Usefulness aside Derham in fact believed that the waters are harmoniously distributed. liThe Northern balances the Southern Ocean, the Atlantick the Pacifick Sea. 1124 Derham attempted to show, within the framework of the hydrologic cycle, how almost all the major facets of physical geography-vapours, clouds, rain, temperature, soil fertility, rivers and river gradients -affected one another and gave evidence of design by lithe most indulgent Creator. II 23Marjorie H. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (New York: Norton Library, 1963), p. 346. 24William Derham, Physico-Theology; or A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, From His Works of Creation (London, 1713; 12th edition; London, 1754), pp. 47-48.

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The great Oceans, and the lesser Seas and Lakes, are so admirably well distributed throughout the Globe, as to afford sufficient Vapours for Clouds and Rains, to temperate the Cold of the Northern frozen Air, to cool and mitigate the Heats of the Torrid Zone, and to refresh the Earth with fertile Showers; yea, in some Measure to minister fresh Waters to the Fountains and Rivers. Nay, so abundant is this great Blessing, which the most indulgent Creator hath afforded us by Means of this Distribution of the Waters I am speaking of, that there is more than a scanty, bare Provision, or mere Sufficiency; even a Plenty, a Surplusage of this useful Creation of God, (the fresh Waters) afforded to the World; and they so well ordered, as not to drown the Nations of the Earth, nor to stagnate, stink, and poison, or annoy them; but to be gently carried through convenient Channels back again to their grand Fountain the Sea; and many of them through such large Tracts of Land, and to such prodigious Distances, that it is a great Wonder the Fountains should be high enough, or the Seas low enough, ever to afford so long a Conveyance. 25 To Derham, there was no mere "Sufficiency" of fresh water but a "Surplusage." Emphasis on fertility recurs in the chapter, "Of the Soils and Moulds in the Earth." Every country abounds with its proper trees. Vegetables flourish and abundantly answer the command of the Creator when the earth and waters were ordered to their peculiar places. "And God said, Let the Earth bring forth Grass, the Herb yielding Seed, and the Tree yielding Fruit after his Kind" (Gen. 1:2). Derham quoted from the Holy Writ and added the gloss, "All which we actually see is so" (p. 61)., Shaftesbury, heterodox Deistic view. Compared with Ray's discussion of the hydrologic cycle, Derham'S is far less detailed and far more rhetorical. In the first part of the eighteenth century, other semi-philosophical works of wide appeal appeared in England, including those of Cotton Mather, William Wollaston, 25Ibid. (1754), pp, 49-52. 110

and Anthony Cooper the third Earl of Shaftesbury. We have already sampled the exuberance of Mather and Wollaston. Shaftesbury's hymns to nature displayed a special sort of exuberanceone that became possible when Biblical constraints were wholly removed. As a philosophical Deist Shaftesbury was not obliged to interpret the Bible's more awesome messages: the Flood, the Last Judgment, or the Dissolution of the World. His Characteristicks was subtitled A Philosophical Rhapsody. And rhapsodic indeed was Shaftesbury's appraisal of the earth. How comfortable is it to those who come out hence alive, to breathe a purer Air! to see the rejoicing Light of Day! and tread the fertile Gound! How gladly they contemplate the Surface of the Earth, their habitation, heated and enliven'd by the Sun, and temper'd by the fresh Air of fanning Breezes! These exercise the resty Plants, and scour the unactive Globe. And when the Sun draws hence thick clouded Streams and Vapours, 'tis only to digest and exult the unwholesom Particles, and commit 'em to the sprightly Air; which soon imparting its quick and vital Spirit, renders 'em again with improvement to the Earth, in gentle Breathings, or in rich Dews and Fruitful Showers. 26 In contrast to orthodox Christian apologists, who saw fertility nearly everywhere (the exceptions being those places which God specifically condemned), Shaftesbury's euphoria extended even to the barren parts of the world, the existence of which he clearly recognized. The "vast Deserts, " ghastly in a sense, yet "want not their Peculiar Beautys, The Wildness pleases. We seem to live alone with Nature. We view her in her inmost Recesses, and contemplate her with more Delight in these original Wilds, then in the artificial labyrinths and feign'd Wildernesses of the Palace," However contrary deserts are to human nature, they are "beauteous in themselves, and fit to raise our Thoughts in Admiration of that Divine Wisdom, so far superior to our short Views If (p. 388). 26 Anthony Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, II, An Enquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit: A Philosophical Rhapsody (2nd edition; London, 1714), p. 377; first published, 1711. 111

A distorted emphasis on the earth's fertility rested not only on a narrow, anthropocentric conception of God's providence but also on a mechanical view of nature. Such a view, for example, was expressed by the geographer Nathanael Carpenter jn 1625, when he likened the earth to a clock, mill,or some "great Engine. ,,27 By the end of the century the mechanical analogy had gained wide acceptance. It is in the character of an engine or machine to remind us of a purpose beyond itself. Nature, insofar as it is like a machine, must have been designed by God for other ends; one such end was without doubt man's material prosperity. Or as Carpenter put it, "for the better convenience of mans life, and encrease of fruits for the use of man" (Bk. II, p. 169). Man is a part of, but is not identical with, a mechanical nature that existed largely to cater to his needs. An earth redundant with useless deserts and seas is clearly defective as machinery for promoting human prosperity. Shaftesbury must be numbered among those who did not share this mechanical interpretation of nature. He saw the relation of God to nature as that of mind to human body rather than of clockmaker to c lock. More influential, however, was his comparison of God and nature to the artist and his art. Nature, insofar as it may be likened to an artwork, was not merely something to be manipulated for human benefit; it existed as an object of intrinsic value. Beauty was seen to be distinct from utility. The vast deserts may be of little use but can boast of other virtues. The hydrologic cycle performed an all-important service: the sun drew up vapours to "digest and exult the unwholsom Particles" so that rich dews and fruitful showers may improve the earth.28 The virtue of the cycle however lay also in its own harmony. Shaftesbury's philosophy did not require the earth to be pervasively fertile. God can clothe His wisdom in more sublime and mysterious ways. Despite frequent departures from theological orthodoxy, Shaftesbury's views were well received and came to exercise appreciable influence on the esthetic taste of the eighteenth century. Shaftesbury's popularity may be gauged by the fact that the complete Characteristicks, first published in 1711, reached eleven editions in 1790, in comparison, for example, with John Locke's Collected Works which 27 Carpenter, Bk. I, p. 12. 28Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, p. 378. 112

went into nine editions in the same period. 29 A Continental detour. Insofar as one sought for evidences of God's wisdom in the physical geography of the earth, it was Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory that bestirred the newly established channels of natural religion and initiated a debate that for a time engaged some of the sharpest minds in England. From the end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth the main arguments for God's providence vis-a.-vis the configuration of the earth were marshalled there. However, they were not confined to Britain: Continental scholars picked up the argument that hinged on the hydrologic cycle and used it in their expositions of physico-theology. To indicate that the hydrologic cycle, with all its theological frills, was not the wayward effulgence of one nation, let us sample the opinion of scholars beyond Britain. In 1734, Johann Fabricius, a theology professor at the College of Hamburg, published a book bearing the unusual title of Hydrotheologie. Its considerable success in Germany prompted a Dr. Burnard to translate it into French. The French version, the Theologie de l'eau, first appeared in 1741 and then again in 1743. Popular though it was, the Hydrotheologie now seems a dull, unoriginal work on the goodness and wisdom of God as manifested in the creation of water. The hydrologic cycle makes its expected entry, but unimaginatively, contributing neither content nor style to the growing literature. Fabricius' work was portentously documented with frequent quotations from the Bible, classical authors, and such British writers as Halley, Boyle, Derham, Ray, and Keill. Fabricius' indebtedness to William Derham'S Physico-Theology-itself a derivative workis especially evident. 30 29R. L. Brett, The Third Earl of. Shaftesbury: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1952), p. 186. 30Johann Albert Fabricius, Hydrotheologie (Hamburg, 1734). The long subtitle: Versurch durch aufmerksame Betrachtung der Eigenschaften, reichen Austheilung und Bewegung der Wasser die Menschen zur Liebe und Bewunderung ihres . . . Schopfers zu ermuntern . . . Nebst einem Verzeichniss von alten und neuen See- und Wasser-Rechten; wie auch Materien und Schriften, die dahin gehoren . . . etc. The French 113

Far better written, far larger in scope, more popular and influential than Fabricius' Hydrotheologie was the Spectacle de la Nature of Abbe Noel-Antoine Pluche. 31 As we have already noted, in the eighteenth century this clever compendium appears to have exceeded in popularity even the works of Buffon and R0usseau. Le Spectacle de la Nature was didactic in intention as it was designed to form the spirit of "les jeunes-Gens curieux. II Its effect, however, was far broader than the education of the young. Pluche's conception of the hydrologic cycle closely resembled that of his English contemporaries. But it was even more bluntly teleological, even more narrowly anthropocentric in the interpretation of Providence, and it led to the same practice of exaggerating the extent of the green earth. From a survey of so many beneficent plants with which the earth is covered, we may pass on to a consideration of springs and rivers by which the earth is watered. We shall follow with some care the movement of these waters which have received orders to sweep our homes, fertilize our plains, quench the thirst of animals, give increase to plants, furnish our tables with fish of excellent succulence, and, by facilitating reCiprocal traffic, link the different regions of the world. We shall then try to discover the origin of their course. By looking into the depths of mountains and plains, we shall be able to catch a glimpse of the marvellous structure of the reservoirs which hold the waters. We shall take note of the purpose of the mountains which gather them, the artifice of the channels which distribute them, and of the nature, use and produce of the vast basin where they go to be of service. We shall assay the ways of the air which keep the vapours going continually, and on the moving force which raises them to sufficient height so translation bears the title Theologie de I 'eau, ou essai sur la bonte, la sagesse et la puissance de Dieu, manifestees dans la creation de I 'eau (Paris, 1743). The hydrologic cycle ("utilite de l'etendue des mers") on p. 151. 31 Abbe Noel-Antoine Pluche, Le Spectacle de la Nature (8 volumes; La Haye, 1735-1747). 114

that they are able to wet even the mountains, and to disperse the waters sufficiently so as to maintainby constantly renewed distillation-the flow of the rivers as well as the greenness of the earth [I, p. ixJ. Elsewhere, Pluche showed an interest in the mechanisms of the hydrologiC cycle. He believed that the quantity of water provided by vapours was a great deal more than that which flowed out daily at the mouths of rivers; that two-thirds of the water lost to the oceans through evaporation were reserved for the needs of the Torrid Zone; that as much rain fell over the seas as over the land (III, pp. 131, 140). All the apparently useless things on earth turned out to be useful on closer examination. Thus the sea with all its salts was actually that which quenched our thirst. The winds that we complain about so much brought to us the vapours of the sea. And what seemed to Pluche a particularly convincing evidence for intelligence was the presence of bodies of sand at the core of the subterranean reservoirs. They were put there, he believed, for an especial purpose, namely, so that the waters should not be released all at once (III, p. 153). The great work on natural history in the eighteenth century was Count Buffon's Histoire Naturelle. The first volumes in the series began to appear shortly after the publication of the last volume of Pluche's popular compendium; and to the end of the eighteenth century Buffon's masterpiece probably had a smaller, though more select, public than Le Spectacle de la Nature. Buffon was well aware of English cosmological thought as expressed by such writers as Whiston, Burnet, Woodward, Keill, Ray, and Halley. Some were dismissed by him as undeserving of serious notice. Whiston was "plus ingenieux que raisonnable, " and Burnet a heterodox theologian with his head wrapped in poetic visions. Woodward came out relatively well. Compared with Whiston and Burnet, Buffon thought of him as a good observer but even so "peu regIe dans ses idees. ,,32 Buffon's conception of the hydrologic cycle was based on Halley's paper in the Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society. Buffon, however, has combined the hydrologic cycle with the erosional work of streams. 32Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Histoire Naturelle (2nd edition; Paris, 1750), I, pp. 66,67. 115

That which produce the greatest and most widespread changes on the surface of the earth are the waters from the sky, the rivers, the streams and the torrents. Their ultimate source goes back to the vapours which the sun raises from the surface of the seas and which the winds carry to all the zones of the earth. These vapours, held up by the air and pushed about by the winds, attach themselves to the mountain summits they encounter, and accumulate there in such great quantity that they form clouds continually and fall incessantly as rain, dew, mist or snow. All these waters at first descend on the plains without following any fixed route, but little by little they deepen their bed. Seeking, by the natural inclination of slopes, the lowest places in the mountain and those rocks which are the easiest to cut or penetrate, they have removed earths and sands, cut deep ravines in the plains by their rapid flow and have opened routes all the way to the sea, which receives as much water at her borders as she loses in evaporation . . . [po 116]. But to Buffon it was the continual movement of the sea that produced the initial great inequalities of the earth. The sea currents have carved the valleys and built up the hills. The waters from the sky, on the other hand, tended little by little to destroy the work of the sea. They lowered the mountains, filled up the valleys, the mouths of rivers and gulfs, and in this way they eventually brought the land down to the level of the sea (p. 124). As to Burnet's notion that the inequalities on the surface of the earth are a mark of imperfection, Buffon replied that they are necessary to the preservation of life. If the earth had a regular surface, a "triste mer" will cover the entire globe (p. 308). By contrast, we now have pleasant hills out of which fresh waters run and these maintain the greenness of the earth. But Buffon didn't wish to put too much weight on the "moral" argument. It sufficed for him to see that the irregularities are the necessary consequences of physical forces (p. 309). Buffon's famous Swedish contemporary, Karl von Linne (Linnaeus, 1707 -1778), deserves brief mention here, more as another illustration of the pervasiveness of a way of thinking than because of any contribution Linnaeus has brought to it. In the 116

Oeconomy of Nature, Linnaeus asserts that all things in the universe declare to man the wisdom of the Creator; that in order to perpetuate the established course of nature the divine wisdom has arranged for all things to contribute to the preservation of every species; that the death and destruction of one thing should always be subservient to the restitution of another. No heavy utilitarian streak mars the tone of the Linnaean discourse. Mountains and valleys do not detract from the beauty of the earth; they have a pleasant aspect, and moreover they increase the surface area of land, allow different plants to thrive and enable rain water to run in continual streams to the sea. The sea supplies exhalations to the lower atmosphere which are condensed into clouds and rain. Most of the rain falls over the mountains and contributes to the springs and fountains that emerge at their base. The chief sources of rivers are fountains, and rills growing by gradual supplies into still larger and larger streams, till at last, after the conflux of a vast number of them, they find no stop, but falling into the sea with lessened rapidity, they there deposit the united stores they have gathered, along with foreign matter, and such earthy substances, as they tore off in their way. Thus the water returns in a circle, whence it first drew its origin, that it may act over the same scene again. 33 In England, the sea was considered by some to be unreasonably large. Burnet postulated a primeval earth that had no sea at all. others, in controverting Burnet, argued for the reasonableness of the present size of the sea and drew on the hydrologic cycle for support. The Swedish naturalist Linnaeus commended the hydrologic cycle as illustrating the wisdom of God but his point of departured differed from that of English scholars like Bentley, KeiIl, and Ray. In diametric opposition to Burnet, Linnaeus postulated a primeval earth that was nearly all water. He supported his thesis from the presence of fossil sea shells on dry land and from the fact that rivers were even 33The quotation is from the Stillingfleet-Biberg translation of Linnaeus f Oeconomia naturae; B. Stillingfleet, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick . (4th edition; London, 1791), p. 44.

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now contributing to the growth of the continent by dumping materials along the shores. Linnaeus therefore conceived the original Eden as an island where all the animals and plants, now widely scattered over the earth, were conveniently gathered for the service and pleasure of the first man. 34 Two English popularizers: Goldsmith and Wesley. Let us return to England. In the last decades of the eighteenth century there appeared in England two very popular natural histories written by men who had won fame in other fields: Oliver Goldsmith and John Wesley. Both authors drew heavily on the findings of Continental authorities. We have noted that the chief source for Goldsmith's Animated Nature was Buffon's Histoire Naturelle. Another writer on whom Goldsmith depended-though to a less extent than on Buffon-was Pluche. In discussing the hydrologic cycle Goldsmith evaluated the rival hypotheses of both the French hydrologist De la Hire and of Edmund Halley. De la Hire contended-with an impressive display of experimental evidence and calculations-that rains were quite incapable of maintaining the flow of rivers; and that rivers, therefore, must be supplied from the sea, strained through the pores of the earth.35 Halley, on the other hand, attempted to demonstrate that clouds alone yielded sufficient water for the supply of rivers. Goldsmith thereupon remarked that an appeal to the seeming impartiality of mathematics did not of itself resolve the problem. "Both sides have brought mathematics to their aid; and have shown, that long and laborious calculations can at any time be made, to obscure both sides of the question. 36 In Goldsmith's time Halley's hypothesis enjoyed the greater popularity. Yet to Goldsmith "it is still pressed with great difficulties." The 34Given in his address "Oratio de Telluris Habitabilis Incremento, " 1743; see K. H. Hagberg, Carl Linnaeus, translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), pp. 198-199. Stillingfleet, pp. 66-68. 35For De la Hire's idea on the inadequacy of rainwater as the source of springs, see his article "Remarque sur l'eau de la pluie, & sur l'origine des Fontaines; avec quelques particularitez sur la construction des Cisternes," Memoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, 1703 (Paris, 1705), pp. 56-69. 360liver Goldsmith, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature (philadelphia, 1795), I, p. 123. 118

reader, he said, must be content to "settle in conscious ignorance. " To Goldsmith, ever since the "Wisest of the Jews" first preached the cyclic course of all nature, the great circulation of water that enabled the earth to maintain its fertility and verdure has persistently attracted the curiosity of man, and "divided the opinions of mankind, more than any other topic in natural history" (p. 122). The hydrologic cycle found favour because it excused the disproportionate size of the oceans and argued for the fertility of the earth. It was Goldsmith's belief that when we surveyed the surface of our globe the most obvious beauty was its verdant covering (p. 19). However, he recognized more fully than perhaps most of his eminent contemporaries that certain parts of the globe were desolate. Of the polar regions he said "Nothing can be more mournful or hideous than the picture which travellers present of those wretched regions" (p. 17). Unlike Shaftesbury, Goldsmith had little appetite for deserts which he characterized as "entirely barren, except where they are found to produce serpents, and that in such quantities, that some extensive plains seem almost entirely covered with them" (p. 18). In March 1775, John Wesley wrote: -''I had finished the additions which I designed to make to the System of Natural Philos0phy' before I saw Dr. Goldsmith's 'History of the Earth and Animated Nature.' It seemed to me, that had he published this but a few years sooner, my design would have been quite superceded. ,,37 However, the tone of Wesley's survey differs markedly from that of Goldsmith. It is less objective and more concerned with purpose. The basic sources are not the same. Instead of the scientific writings of Buffon, Wesley depended on the philosophical work of the German author John Francis Buddaeus, and also on the works of such scientist-theologians as Ray, Derham, and Niewentyt. The hydrologic cycle is a prominent theme in the volume on physical geography. Thus, of mountains Wesley wrote: The benefit of mountains in general is not only, that vapours driven against them are condensed, so as to be precipitated through the chinks of the 37John Wesley, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation (New edition; London, 1809), I, p. x. 119

rocks, but that afterwards in their bowels they are preserved till they form rivulets, and then rivers. Vapours would fall in rain or dew though there were no mountains, but then they would fall equally, over considerable places of the globe at once and so would be sucked deep in the ground, or make an universal puddle; whereas by means of mountains they are perpetually pouring down in particular places, and treasuring up a constant supply to the rivers [III, p. 9]. In discussing the distribution of land and water, Wesley paraphrased-and in several places repeated word for word-the views of William Derham. Like Derham he claimed that the present distribution of the waters and the dry land only seemed undesigned to the careless looker; that in fact they showed a "just equipoise, "and, moreover, are so ordered as to supply no !'bare sufficiency" but a "surplusage" of waters to the land (p. 30). There are, it is true, the !'vast sandy des arts of the Mongol Tartars, "but, providentially, "wherever you dig there rises fresh water. Were it not for this they must have been altogether uninhabited, either by man or beast" (p. 36). Christopher Packe, M. D. The author of A Dissertation upon the Surface of the Earth, Christopher Packe, was neither a prolific man of letters interested in the popularization of science, nor a scientist of the stature of Buffon or Hutton. His interest for us lies in one rather unusual idea which he developed in the context of the hydrologic cycle. Packe was very proud of his designs for a large-scaled map of East Kent. He described it as a "Philosophico-Chorographical Chart, " and displayed a sample, together with his explanations, to the Royal Society in 1736. The chart showed the ramifications of valleys (which he compared with the veins of an animal body) in great detail. He emphasized the "exact and uniform Regularity" of these valleys and noted that they were adjusted to fit with the "known Motion" of water. The routes for the conduction of water, begin with the smallest and almost imperceptible Depressions at the extremities of the Hills, which deep !ning and wid 'ning by degrees into manifest Channels are collected into Branches, and these again into greater and greater, till by one common Conveyance they disgorge themselves into the

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Marshes, and from thence into the Sea; the Land all the way gradually descending thither. 38 The water is kept in constant circulation through the network of channels, by some Operation or other that continually exhales an immense quantity of Vapours from both the Sea and the Earth, which are condensed by the hills and remanded by these Channels into the Sea; there seems to be a constant Necessity for many, and oftentimes for most of these Passages, according to the Quantity of Dews, Rains and Springs that need Avoidance into the main Collection [po 5]. However, Packe had to retreat almost immediately from this position. Much of Kent is underlain by chalk and there are many dry valleys. Many of these Channels are always dry . . . even in the wettest Seasons . . . So that whatever might be the Original Use of these Vallies in Nature's first Work, many of them must have been ever since useless, as they are now [pp. 11-12]. What could have been the first use of these dry valleys? Packe suggested that they were used for the drainage of the Mosaic Deluge; that they were in fact caused by the withdrawal of the Flood. But this regular system of channels sloping gently to the sea also has a present use-for air drainage. May not then these Vallies by dividing that Element [air], replete with gross and faeculent Vapours, into so many Streams, by continually agitating it against the Hills, and running it in different Directions in these winding Channels, may they not purify and volatilize it, and thereby preserve its Elasticity? May they not by mixing the Land and Sea-Airs . . and by blending them intimately together, greatly fertilize the Soil, and promote the various Works of Vegetation? [Pp. 12-13.] But to Packe these were philosophical questions. He submitted that he had neither the ability nor the leisure to pursue 38Christopher Packe, A Dissertation upon the Surface of the Earth, As Delineated in a Speciman of a Philosophicochorographical Chart of East Kent (London, 1737), p. 5. 121

them. He was content with the collection of facts, with noting the exact and uniform "Regularity" of the valleys for the circulation of the "Fluid, " the circulation itself being accountable by the hydrologic Cycle. The scientific statement. The scientific understanding of the hydrologic cycle during the last quarter of the eighteenth century may be illustrated from the writings of Dobson, Hutton, Dalton, and Playfair. Again we shall see that even the scientists, when they undertook to describe the hydrologic cycle, occasionally slipped into a style of writing more expressive of religious sentiment than of scientific detachment. Hutton, Dalton, and Playfair are of course well-known figures. Practically unknown is Dr. Dobson of Liverpool, whose importance to us lies in his paper on annual evaporation at Liverpool. This paper was communicated to the Royal Society, not by Dobson, but by John Fothergill, a fellow of the Royal Society. Since Halley's famous work on the "Circulation of Watry Vapours, " which saw print in 1693, the quantitative aspects of the hydrologic cycle gained little attention in England. Dobson's study came more than eighty years after Halley's. The neglect was remarkable in view of the popularity and the almost constant exploitation of the concept of the hydrologic cycle in physico-theology . An interesting difference in approach existed between Halley's and Dobson's studies on the problems of evaporation, stream flow, and the hydrologic cycle. They selected different types of earth surface for emphasis. Halley calculated the amount of vapour that would be removed from the Mediterranean Sea during a summer day and compared the figure with the amount of water returned to the sea by rivers in the same period. There was a large discrepancy: far more was evaporated from the sea than returned to it by rivers; and Halley suggested that a large portion of the vapour lost during daytime was probably given back to the sea at night as dew and rain. Dobson, in contrast, was interested in the problem of water balance over land. To determine the relation between annual precipitation and evaporation, he procured, two well-varnished tin vessels; one of which was to serve the purpose of a rain-gage; the other was to be employed as . . . evaporating vessel. . . . These vessels were placed in the middle of a

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grass-plot, on a rising ground adjoining and immediately overlooking the town of Liverpool. 39 Records of monthly precipitation and evaporation were kept during the years 1772-1775 inclusive, as well as temperature and strength of wind, the latter designated by the number of dots. According to Dobson, the records showed that annual precipitation (37.43 inches) in Lancashire slightly exceeded the annual evaporation (36.78 inches) even when the evaporation figures were based on loss from surfaces of open water. And we farther find, that the quantity exhaled from the surface of the earth is little more than a sixth part of what descends in rain; we must therefore have very large supplies from other regions, from the surrounding sea, and from the ocean of warmer climates . . . [po 254}. Dobson concluded his paper with a precis of the hydrologic cycle, followed by the almost-to-be-anticipated encomium on the wisdom of the ancient Preacher. So Lancashire imported the bulk of its moisture from warmer seas: These foreign supplies, however, are uniformly restored to the sources from which they were derived: for that proportion of rain which rises not in vapour, after moistening and refreshing the earth, forms springs, brooks, and rivers, and is perpetually returning to the ocean whence it was taken; so truly philosophical are the words of the preacher when speaking of this vast circulation: 'All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again' [pp. 254-255}. The fame of the Edinburgh physician, James Hutton, now rests firmly on The Theory of the Earth. It is an accepted classic in geology. Less widely known is the fact that in 1784, several years before the publication of The Theory of the Earth, Hutton read a paper called "The Theory of Rain" to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This paper lacks the substance and 39Dr. Dobson, "Observations on the Annual Evaporation at Liverpool in Lancashire; and on Evaporation considered as a Test of the Moisture or Dryness of the Atmosphere, " Philos. Trans., Royal Society, LXVII (1777), 245. 123

originality of the later work, but is relevant to our theme in several respects: for instance, it combined the concept of the hydrologic cycle with the idea of the general wind circulation, and these circulatory processes were thought by Hutton to illustrate the wisdom and economy of nature. Also, in his discussion of the "design" of hydrologic processes he fell into the common error of exaggerating the extent of fertile land. Scientifically, the weakest point in "The Theory of Rain" is that, unlike Dr. Dobson of Liverpool, Dr. Hutton of Edinburgh failed to substantiate his ideas with experiments and calculations. The main problem for Hutton was to explain condensation. Hutton believed that water is condensed from atmospheric vapour when air of different temperature and sufficient degree of saturation mix. It is a remarkable idea for his time. 40 That condensation will take place when saturated air masses of sharply different temperatures meet is still a generally accepted idea in meteorology. But present thinking is that only fog or low cloud may be so produced, not rain. Also, what must appear quaint to present thinking is the teleological principle that lies at the basis of Hutton's theory of rain: The law of nature, on which this theory of rain is founded, may be now considered in relation to its final cause; or how far it may appear to be conceived in wisdom for the purpose of the world, as affording a proper climate for plants and animals [po 48]. According to Hutton, if the laws governing evaporation and condensation were any different from "that which has been now established in nature, the summer's heat, which is the cause of vegetation, could never have been attended, as at present, with refreshing showers of rain" (p. 48). Hutton's expository style, especially where he tries to develop a consistent theory, does not encourage quotation at length. In substance what he said was that if temperature alone governed the changes in the state of water "the summer hemisphere of the globe would be parched with drought, and the winter hemisphere deluged with rain" (p. 50). But, fortunately for the wise economy of the world, this is not the case. Rain is the result of the mixing of saturated air 40James Hutton, "The Theory of Rain, " Royal Society of Edinburgh, I, Part 2 (1788), 41-86; read by the author, February 2nd, 1784. 124

of different temperatures. Tropical air moves poleward and so removes some of the heat from the torrid regions, while cold air from the frigid regions moves equatorward and tempers "the excessive heat that is excited upon the surface of the earth in the summer solstice" (p. 48). This exchange is part of the general circulation of the atmosphere but in the process of exchange and mixing, c1ouds-providentially-also form and rain falls. In this system then we see, that the cold regions of the polar circles are not useless and inactive in the operations of this world. In like manner, the frozen regions of the Alpine situations of the Continent, serve a purpose . . . by preserving, in the accumulated snows, a store of the winter cold for the summer season; and thus preparing cold portions of the atmosphere to be mixed with the warmer portions, saturated with humidity, and ready to produce rain [po 49]. Instead of an excess of cloud and condensation on the one hand, and, on the other, of sunshine and evaporation, Hutton saw in the present system a wise avoidance of extremes and yet one so contrived as to boast "a variety of different degrees. " It is a system in which "temperate drought and moisture, rain and sunshine. . . are everywhere bestowed with the most provident attention." Perfection of design is evident "where such a multitude of different beings, dependent on the various temperament of those opposite elements, are to be provided with the necessary conditions for their life . . . [po 51J. Hutton believed in the widespread occurrence of rain. "In the actual system of the globe, " he wrote, "there is ample provision made, in general, for rain . . . . " He has, however, a section entitled Of apparent Exceptions from the Generality of Rain. For us who are familiar with the prominent patches of lemon yellow on climate wall-maps and the knowledge that more than a quarter of the earth's land surface is deficient in moisture' it comes as a surprise to read Hutton and discover what he conceived to be the exceptions to the "Generality of Rain. " The Lower Egypt, and a narrow spot upon the coast of Peru are the only examples we have of this singular occurrence. It would have been impossible, a priori, to have concluded, that, of all the places upon the earth, these two should have 125

been those in which rain should not happen; the knowledge of man, in tracing future effects from known causes, will ever be, perhaps too imperfect for such an understanding . . . . But, though we may not form that judgment a priori, yet, finding that these are the only places in which rain does not fall, we may be allowed to conclude, that such is the natural state of the winds about those places, as to prevent the proper conditions for producing rain [po 62]. It may be thought that these exceptions to the generality of rain would be inconsistent with Hutton's theory. Not so, according to Hutton. That the greater part of the earth should be found without rain, would certainly be inconsistent with the theory, but that a particular spot or two, containing no diversity of climate or of country, no variation of mountain and of valley, should be found without rain, instead of transgressing the necessary conclusion of a generality with regard to rain, confirms the theory [po 63]. Again we cannot but be impressed by Hutton's inability to see the Sahara when he got as close to it as Lower Egypt. His neglect of the great deserts of Tartary, when he could pick out the dry spot in Peru, also seems, to say the least, wayward. "The Theory of Rain" shows how theory can blind one to facts. But where the facts appear to support the theory they are readily acknowledged. Thus Hutton recognized that more rain falls over the Great Lakes region of North America than over the Caspian Sea of Asia. That "a greater quantity of rain falls upon a given surface in the smaller continent of the new world, than upon a similar one in the greater continent of the old" is, for Hutton, a confirmation of his ideas (p. 70). In Hutton's later and far more substantial work, Theory of the Earth, the disquisition on the water cycle is short; and, atypically for the work as a whole it is tinted by teleological notions. The processes of the water circuit are linked to the denudation of the land. It is this theme of land degradation, which Hutton elaborated with remarkable detail, that is now his chief clai m to originality in the history of geomorphological

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thought. We may wonder to what extent his initial conception of the denudation of the land is the result of his awareness of certain implications of the water cycle. We have noted how the theme of the "Dissolution of the Earth, " in which the concept of the denudation of land to a common base-level is adumbrated, has in fact grown out of a different intellectual root from that of the water cycle. Writers who have treated of both (Hakewill and Ray, for example), have treated them as separate themes. Buffon may well have been aware of the linkage between them since he provided a brief note on the power of streams to erode within the broader context of the hydrologic cycle. Hutton was probably also aware of the link. He saw water as "essential in the constitution of the world, " that water "is the source of growth and circulation to the organized bodies of this earth, in being the receptacle of rivers, and the fountain of our vapours. ,,41 Physical geography manifests the wisdom of necessity. It is necessary for a living world that the surface of the globe should consist of both land and water. It is necessary that the land should be solid and stable, resisting with great power, the violent efforts of the ocean; and, at the same time, that this solid land should be resolved by the influence of the sun and atmosphere, so as to decay, and thus become a soil for vegetation. But these general intentions are perfectly fulfilled in the constitution of our earth [po 166]. And again in the following extract from the earlier version (1788) of the Theory of the Earth, Hutton showed an awareness of the relation of water circulation to the weathering of rocks and the removal of the decayed layer by rivers. Therefore, the surface of this land, inhabited by man, and covered with plants and animals, is made by nature to decay, in dissolving from that hard and compact state in which it is found below the soil; and this soil is necessarily washed away, by the continual circulation of the water, running from the summits of the mountains towards the 41Hutton, Theory of the Earth (New York: Stechert-Hafner, 1959), I, p. 7; first published, 1795.

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general receptacle of that fluid. 42 But the emphasis in Theory of the Earth was not on the water cycle; it was on a segment of that cycle-the segment in which waters ran downslope from the mountains to the sea and performed the work of erosion. A major weakness, we have noted, in Hutton's ideas on rain and the hydrologic cycle was that he had not troubled to substantiate them with calculations. Had he done so he could hardly have avoided seeing, for example, the vast discrepancy between the amount of water that his method of condensation could produce and the amount actually produced. In spite of the example set by Halley, quantitative evaluations of the hydrologic cycle were few and far between during the course of the eighteenth century. Dobson's small essay was an exception. It attracted the attention of John Dalton whose own meteorological essays carried the quantitative characterization of the hydrologic cycle a few steps further. Dalton in fact contributed significantly to meteorology before he achieved lasting fame for his fundamental work in chemistry. In 1793 there appeared a short essay of his called "On Evaporation, Rain, Hail, Snow, and Dew." Certain conclusions he then reached we still regard as in the main valid today. Among them we may note in paraphrase the following: 1. Evaporation from land must on the whole be less than the rain that falls upon land; otherwise there could be no rivers. 2. Evaporation is less in winter than in summer. 3. It seems probable that evaporation from both land and water, in the temperate and frigid zones, is not equal to the rain that falls there, even in summer. 4. The reason that a southwest wind in the temperate zone brings rain seems to be that, coming from the torrid zone, it is charged with vapour, and losing heat as it proceeds northward, a precipitation of the vapour ensues; but a northeast wind, blowing from a cold into a warmer country, has its capacity for vapour increased, and therefore it usually promotes evaporation. 5. More rain falls in mountainous than in level countries. However, the relation between height of mountains and rain is not perfectly clear. Thus Switzerland and the Alps do not in general receive more rain than the north of England. 42Hutton, "Theory of the Earth, " Trans. Royal Society of Edinburgh, I (1788), 214. 128

6. Raindrops increase in size through the process of coalescence. 43 These conclusions of Dalton's would not look out of place in a modern textbook on meteorology. But one that would i mmediately follows the coalescent theory of rain drops. We should scarcely be excused, in concluding this essay without calling the reader's attention for the moment to the beneficent and wise laws established by the Author of Nature, to provide for the various exigencies of the sublunary creation, and to make the several parts dependent upon each other, so as to form one well regulated system, or whole. In the torrid zone, and we may add in the temperate and frigid zones also, in summer, the heat produced by the action of the solar rays would be insupportable, were not a large portion of it absorbed, in the process of evaporation, into the atmosphere, without increasing its temperature; this heat is again given out in winter, when the vapour is condensed, and mitigates the severity of the cold . . . [po 137]. It is not only Dalton's reference to the beneficent Author of Nature in an otherwise purely scientific essay that now seems to us quaint. It is also his insistence on "one well regulated system or whole." Belief in the wholeness of nature, intelligible in all its multi-faceted relations to the human person, was still commonly held at that time. The belief needed no examination for it was guaranteed by a particular conception of God. In 1799 John Dalton read a paper to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. The subject was: "Experiments and Observations to determine whether the Quantity of RAIN and DEW is equal to the Quantity of WATER carried off by the Rivers and raised by Evaporation; with an Enquiry into the ORIGIN of SPRINGS." In this paper Dalton sought to demonstrate the superiority of Halley's theory of springs and rivers to that of De La Hire. We remember how Oliver Goldsmith was unable to judge between them for both were based on experi ments and calculations. Dalton also sought to calculate the water balance for the whole of England and Wales, thus going beyond the earlier effort 43John Dalton, "On Evaporation, Rain, Hail, Snow, and Dew, " Sixth Essay in Meteorological Observations and Essays (2nd edition; Manchester, 1834), pp. 130-136. 129

of Dobson who attempted to do this for Lancashire. I think we may fairly conclude-that the rain and dew of this country are equivalent to the quantity of water carried off by evaporation and by the rivers. And as nature acts upon general laws, we ought to infer, that it must be the case in every other country, until the contrary is proved. 44 At the beginning of this paper Dalton could not refrain from expressing again his admiration for the beautiful system of nature and for the provident, unceasing circulation of water. It is scarcely possible to contemplate without admiration the beautiful system of nature by which the surface of the earth is continually supplied with water, and that unceasing circulation of a fluid so essentially necessary to the very being of the animal and vegetable kingdoms takes place [po 346]. Hutton's Theory of the Earth received little attention. The neglect was at least in part the result of Hutton's turgid style. This defect John Playfair undertook to remove~ In 1802 he published the Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth. Playfair expounded Hutton's basic themes in language far more lucid than the original, and he provided further examples. The Illustrations, though better received than the original Theory, nevertheless had nothing like the popularity of the physicotheological works such as those produced by Ray and his imitator Paley, nor the apologetic opera known as the Bridgewater Treatises. In the course of expounding Hutton, Playfair explicitly joined the geologic cycle to the hydrologic cycle (Fig. 9). We have been long accustomed to admire that beautiful contrivance in nature, by which the water of the ocean, drawn up in vapour by the atmosphere, imparts, in its descent, fertility to the earth, and becomes the great cause of vegetation and of life; but now we find, that this vapour 44Dalton, "Experiments and Observations to determine whether the Quantity of Rain and Dew is equal to the Quantity of Water carried off by the Rivers and raised by Evaporation; With an Enquiry into the Origin of Springs, " Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical SOCiety of Manchester, V, Part II (1802), 365. 130

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Fig. 9. Top: The hydro-geologic cycle according to John Playfair. Bottom: The hydrologic cycle represented in a circular diagram. (Reproduced from Wisler and Brater, Hydrology, by kind permission. )

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not only fertilizes, but creates the soil; prepares it from the solid rock, and, after employing it in the great operations of the surface, carries it back into the regions where all its mineral characters are renewed. Thus, the circulation of moisture through the air, is a prime mover, not only in the annual succession of seasons, but in the great geological cycle, by which the waste and reproduction of entire continents is circumscribed. 45 A special merit of the Huttonian theory, Playfair added, was that jt ascribed to the features of the earth's crust an order similar to that which existed in the province of biology: that it produces seas and continents, not by accident, but by the operation of regular and uniform causes; that it makes the decay of one part subservient to the restoration of another, and gives stability to the whole, not by perpetuating individuals but by reproducing them in succession [po 176]. A conclusion that Playfair drew from Hutton's theory was that nature could not decay. Playfair compared Buffon's gloomy view with that which he attributed to Hutton. Now, Buffon had great merit, Playfair conceded, but his representation of the earth as continually cooling and that this led to the final extinction of all life and motion was a "dismal and unphilosophic vision." It was unworthy of the genius of Buffon and "forms a complete contrast to the theory of Dr. Hutton, where nothing is to be seen beyond the continuation of the present order; where no latent feed of evil threatens final destruction of the whole; and where the movements are so perfect, that they can never terminate of themselves." This, Playfair concluded, was surely "a view of the world more suited to the dignity of Nature, and the Wisdom of its Author, than has yet been offered by any other system of cosmology" (p. 486). More compliments to God: Nineteenth century. Playfair's Illustrations may be taken as the last work in which theological motivations have contributed towards a more comprehensive grasp of the relatedness of the multifarious hydro-geological 45John Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (Edinburgh, 1802), p. 128; reprinted with original pagination (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956). 132

processes. Thereafter, compliments continued to be lavished on the Author of Nature but they were not based on fresh insights. In physical geography the hydrologic cycle remained the most serviceable concept to the apologist. It would be monotonous in the extreme to quote from the many reputable authors in the first half of the nineteenth century who trotted out the same concept and seldom bothered even to vary the rhetoric. Some idea of the cycle's persistence and popularity may be gained from the following selections out of a long list. William Paley's Natural Theology; or evidence of the existence and attributes of the Deity, Collected from the appearances of nature was first published in 1802. Of this work James Paxton wrote in 1826 that it enjoyed "universal and permanent esteem" not only in England but also in France despite "the desolating influence of the Revolution. "46 Paley's treatment of the hydrologic cycle was conventional and naive compared, for example, with that of John Ray written one hundred years earlier. However, Paley did reject the grosser forms of anthropocentric distortion. Some have thought, that we have too much water upon the globe, the sea occupying above three quarters of its whole surface. But the expanse of ocean, immense as it is, may be no more than sufficient to fertilize the earth. Or, independently of this reason, I know not why the sea may not have as good a right to its place as the land. It may proportionably support as many inhabitants; minister to as large an aggregate of enjoyment. The land only affords a habitable surface; the sea is habitable to a great depth. 47 John Bird Sumner, a Fellow of Eton College, wrote A Treatise on the Records of the Creation, and on the moral attributes of the Creator; with particular reference to the Jewish history, and to the consistency of the principle of population with the wisdom and goodness of the Deity, 2nd edition, London 1818. The book's second chapter is called "On the Opinion which ascribes the Formation of the World to Chance." In this chapter the hydrologic cycle was introduced as an overpowering 46James Paxton, Illustrations of Paley's Natural Theology (Oxford, 1826), dedicatory page to the Bishop of Durham. 47William Paley, Natural Theology (Stereotype edition; Boston, 1836), p. 210; first published, 1802. 133

argument against chance. 48 Its services were also called upon in the chapter "On the Wisdom of the Creator" (IT, pp. 23-24). William Buckland's inaugural lecture at Oxford, Vindiciae Geologicae, was published in 1820. In the dedication to the Chancellor of the University, Buckland explained his purpose as: "to show that the study of geology has a tendency to confirm the evidences of natural religion; and that the facts developed by it are consistent with the accounts of the creation and deluge recorded in the Mosaic writings. ,,49 Thousands of examples, Buckland claimed, can be adduced from geology to demonstrate the design and "benevolent contrivance" of the Omnipotent Architect: Among the few he picked for special consideration was the hydrologic cycle. It was in the hydrologic cycle-this "wonderful and unceasing circulation"-that "we find such undeniable proofs of a nicely balanced adaptation of means to ends, of wise foresight and benevolent intention and infinite power, that he must be blind indeed, who refuses to recognize in them proofs of the most exalted attributes of the Creator" (p. 13). The theme of the hydrologic cycle was sufficiently important to Buckland for him to reintroduce it in his Bridgewater Treatise which bears the title Geology and Mineralogy, considered with reference to Natural Theology (1836). In this work, published at a time when geology was about to be transformed under the impact of Charles Lyell, Buckland saw fit to pay homage to John Ray whom he called "one of our earliest and most original writers on Physico-theology. "50 The Bridgewater Treatises themselves proved to be the last formal occasion when natural theology and science could be treated as but different routes to the same end-the understanding of nature. If the Right Honourable and Reverend Francis Henry, the Earl of Bridgewater (1756-1829), had died some twenty years later, it seems improbable that his will could be strictly carried out. For his will was that the president of the 48John Bird Sumner, A Treatise on the Records of the Creation (2nd edition; London, 1818), I, pp. 53-54. 49William Buckland, Vindiciae Geologicae (Oxford, 1820), dedicatory page to William Wyndham, Chancellor of the University of Oxford. 50Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with reference to Natural Theology (London, 1836), p. 555. 134

most prestigious scientific body in England, the Royal Society, should appoint scholars to write On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation. All reasonable arguments were to be used, "as for instance the variety and formation of God's creatures in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; the effect of digestion, and thereby of conversion; the construction of the hand of man, and an infinite variety of other arguments; as also discoveries ancient and modern, in arts, sciences, and the whole extent of literature. ,,51 Of the eight contributors to the Bridgewater Treatises, six were in fact Fellows of the Royal Society. All, with the exceptions of Thomas Chalmers who was a professor of Divinity, had been trained in either the physical or the medical sciences. Some of the treatises appear to have been popular. The work of John Kidd, for example, first appeared in 1833 but required a fifth edition in 1837 and reached a sixth edition in 1852. The treatise by William Whewell reached a seventh edition in 1839. The last publication of the entire series (in ten volumes) occurred between 1852 and 1869. We should note that the treatises were written in the popular style. Although some of the authors were distinguished scientists they made little attempt to be either very scientific or original in the Bridgewater expositions. John Kidd, for example, was a professor first of chemistry, then of medicine, at Oxford. He authored the Outlines of Mineralogy (1809), which was a worthy contribution to a new field in two volumes, but he showed his interest in religion by publishing in 1824 a book on comparative anatomy, the main purpose of which was to provide further illustrations to Paley's Natural Theology. 52 Earlier, in 1815, he examined the relation between geology and Mosaic history in a chapter of his otherwise unenthusiastic study called A Geological Essay on the Imperfect Evidence in support of a Theory of the Earth. The care with which Kidd habitually evaluated evidence and wrote was exemplified by the wording of his conclusion: "the science of geology is at present so 51 Prefatory notice, with list of Bridgewater lecturers, in each of the separate Bridgewater treatises. 52John Kidd, An Introductory Lecture to a Course in Comparative Anatomy, illustrative of Paley's Natural Theology (Oxford, 1824) . 135

completely in its infancy as to render hopeless any attempt at successful generalization, and may therefore be induced to persevere with patience in the accumulation of useful facts. "53 However, Kidd discarded caution in his Bridgewater treatise and wrote much of it in purple prose. Especially evident is this in the short section on the uses of water and on the hydrologic cycle. On the uses of water Kidd declaimed: How great is the comfort, to say nothing of the salubrity of the practice, which results to him from the application of water to the surface of the body, by means either of the bath or any simple process! and again, the change of linen in which he is partially clothed is rendered equally comfortable and salutary, in consequence of its having been previously submitted to the process of washing. The infusion of coffee or of tea, which is probably an essential part of his earliest meal, could not have been prepared without water . ._ . . 54 On the hydrologic cycle Kidd was disarmingly unoriginal. He simply expressed an unclouded faith in the providential arrangement of the earth for the health and the commercial needs of man. Thus while we have seen the air of the atmosphere serving as the reservoir of that mass of water from whence clouds of rain, and consequently springs and rivers are derived, we have also seen that it at the same time prevents, by the effect of its pressure on their surface, the unlimited evaporation of the ocean, and other sources, from whence that mass of water is supplied. And again, while the agitation of the air contributes to the health of man, by supplying those currents which remove or prevent the accumulation of local impurities, it at the same time facilitates the intercourse between different nations in which the welfare of the whole 53Kidd, A Geological Essay on the Imperfect Evidence in Support of a Theory of the Earth (Oxford, 1815), p. 269. 54Kidd, On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Physical Condition of Man (5th edition; London, 1837), p. 110. 136

world is ultimately concerned. 55 William Prout, F. R. S. did pioneer work in physiological chemistry. He discovered, among other things, that the excrement of the boa-constrictor contained ninety percent of uric acid. His Bridgewater treatise bears the hodge-podge title Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology. First published in 1834, it required a third edition in 1845. The work has little value from either a scientific or a theological point of view. It is divided into two books, one on chemistry and the other on meteorology, the two having little to do with each other. In the section on meteorology the strongest evidence for "the agency of an intelligent Being operating with some ulterior purpose" is the distribution of water over the globe. "What would be the result, for instance, if the Pacific or the Atlantic oceans were to be converted into continents? Would not the climates of the existing continents . . . be completely changed by such an addition to the land, and the whole of their fertile regions be reduced to arid deserts ?"56 Thus the complicated arguments of the Burnet-Keill controversy were reduced-by the time of the Bridgewater writers-to a pair of shop-worn, rhetorical questions. Perhaps the most popular of the Bridgewater series was the one by William Whewell, in which astronomy and general physics were considered in relation to natural theology. A man of great physical and mental energies, Whewell had written on mineralogy, physics, mathematics, architecture, history of science, moral philosophy, and much else besides. His most substantial contributions were to the history and philosophy of 55Ibid., pp. 151-152. The chief authority for Kidd's account of the hydrologic cycle was Lucretius. This is peculiar for although in De rerum natura, Bk. VI, Lucretius interprets the stability of sea level as the result of balance between intake from rivers and removal by evaporation, he explains the origin of springs and rivers as the result of the subterranean infiltration of sea water. Moreover, the Lucretian world-view is hardly compatible with that of a natural theologian. 56William Prout, Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology (London, 1834), p. 186. 137

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the inductive sciences, and to the theory of tides. His reputation with general readers was launched, however, with the Bridgewater treatise. Of all the comments on the hydrologic cycle in the Bridgewater series, that of Whewell was the most restrained and precise. Dalton's work on evaporation provided a sound basis for his discourse on "The Laws of Heat with respect to Water." Whewell recognized the compound nature of water circulation; i. e., the existence of "a narrower circle between the evaporation and precipitation of the land itself, . . . and a wider interchange between the sea and the lands which feed the springs. ,,57 He lent his weight to the commonly held opinion that large oceans were necessary to the maintenance of life on land. "It appears then that the magnitude of the ocean is one of the conditions to which the structure of all organized beings which are dependent upon climate must be adapted" (p. 53) . Taking the Bridgewater treatises as a whole, arguments for the wisdom and providence of God were based primarily on anatomieal evidence, to a less extent on astronomical evidence, and least-except for William Buckland's contribution-on the facts of geology and physical geography. High regard for anatomical evidence was already apparent during the time of Newton and Boyle. Newton believed that the mechanism of the eye could only be intelligible through reference to the Creator. And Boyle thought that "there is more of admirable Contrivance in a Mans Muscles, than in (what we yet know of) the Celestial Orbs. ,,58 Where the earth itself is examined for evidence of design the hydrologic cycle makes an almost unfailing appearance. We have come to expect it as a focus for religious sentiment in apologetic literature; more surprising is that the cycle can excite fervor even in works of a purely scientific and technical nature. An example is J. F. Daniell's Meteorological Essays and Observations (1823). The book is unadorned except for graphs of monthly temperature, dew-point, and the statistical tables. Daniell was the inventor of a simple but effective 57William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (7th edition; London, 1839), p. 94. 58Robert Boyle, A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (London, 1688), p. 43. 138

hygrometer; and having found the means of determining humidity with some accuracy he was led "to commence a series of observations; more with a view of trying the powers of the instrument, than of entering fully upon the general subject." However, the contemplation of the hydrologic cycle caused him to depart from the cool prose of science, as the following passage-quite at variance with the style of the rest of the text-shows: "In tracing the harmonious results of such discordant operations, it is impossible not to pause, to offer up a humble tribute of admiration of the designs of a beneficent Providence . . . . "59 Relation to geologic cycle. A feature that is notably lacking in much of the physico-theological literature of the early nineteenth century is any comment on the geological processes of erosion and deposition. Such processes are easily subsumed under the scheme of the hydrologic cycle. We have noted that Ray, Buffon, and Hutton have all indicated an awareness of how geological processes might operate in a segment of the water circuit. Playfair in 1802 explicitly linked the water and the geologic cycles. But the fact that rivers, as they move from their mountain sources to the sea, would erode the deposit is neglected by the Bridgewater writers. One reason may be that geological processes were not thought of as cyclic. Erosion and deposition serve to bring about the "dissolution of the earth. " Such processes are progressive and must lead in time to the reduction of the land to the level of the sea. Hakewill, who argued against the earth's dissolution, had difficulty in explaining away the inevitable consequence of prolonged erosion. The only answer to this problem, one that would make geological processes cyclic, had been suggested by Philo at the beginning of the Christian era. The answer was (and is) that mountains are worn down but they also grow. The idea received of course much fuller treatment more than seventeen centuries later in Hutton's Theory of the Earth; and it was given further polish by Playfair. However, neither Hutton nor Playfair left much i mpact on the science and theology of the early decades of the nineteenth century. Although they laid the foundations of modern geology it was Charles Lyell who succeeded in battering down the old cataclYSmiC beliefs, and substituted in their place 59 J.F. Daniell, Meteorological Essays and Observations (London, 1823), p. 131. 139

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the doctrine of uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism is sympathetic to the notion of "order" and "wise economy" in physicotheology but antipathetic to the notion of "decree." The Mosaic deluge appeared by decree. A catastrophist like William Buckland, whose influence temporarily put the theories of Hutton and Playfair in the shade, emphasized "order" and "wise economy" when he wished to consider the present patterns and operations of the earth; that old stand-by, the hydrologic cycle, served this purpose well. But when the subject was geologic history-how the present configuration of the earth came aboutbelief in "wise economy" gave way to belief in catastrophic events. Charles Lyell, although he eschewed theology in science, nevertheless may be said to have extended the philosphy of ''Wise economy" to the operations of the past. Like Hutton and Playfair before him, Lyell combined the water and the geologic cycles. It is well known that the lands elevated above the sea attract, in proportion to their volume and density, a larger quantity of that aqueous vapour which the heated atmosphere continually absorbs from the surface of lakes and the ocean. By these means, the higher regions become perpetual reservoirs of water, which descend and irrigate the lower valleys and plains. In consequence of this provision, almost all the water is first carried to the highest regions, and is then made to descend by steep declivities towards the sea; so that it acquires superior velocity, and removes a greater quantity of soil, than it would do if the rain had been destributed over the plains and mountains equally in proportion to their relative areas. Almost all the water is also made by these means to pass over the greatest distances which each region affords, before it can regain the sea. 60 In this extract Lyell drew attention to the relation between stream velocity and erosive power, between stream velocity and steepness of slope, and noted that water would have acquired less velocity if the rains were not concentrated in regions 60Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (3rd edition; London, 1835), I, pp. 246-247.

140

of steep declivity, the mountains. Lyell was of courSe distinguished not for his contribution to the hydrologic cycle but for his many detailed descriptions of the work of streams and for the inferences he drew from them. The quotation merely serves to show that Lyell recognized the work of rivers within the broad context of the hydrologic cycle. A contemporary figure of far less importance than Charles Lyell in the history of ideas was John Macculloch, M. D., F. R. S. , F. L. S., F. G. S., etc. Yet we may mention him here for his intuitive grasp of a dynamic principle in soil formation. This occurs in a physico-theological work that is otherwise undistinguished. First, let us look at his naively sketched hydrologic cycle: The clouds are raised from the sea in a tenfold proportion compared to the land; but in this proportion they do not fall into the sea again. Whether the efficient cause is here also to be sought in electricity, we can at least see the reason, and why, above all, they seek the mountains. The land was to be their destination; for their office was to bring food to the vegetable world. The declivity of the mountains demand also a larger supply, since the water cannot there rest: while to them, further, is it committed to distribute the streams to the lower lands, as the heart of this vital circulation. 61 There is not much in this, but on soil formation he was better. According to Macculloch, we owe to mountains not only the descent of the rains and "the whole machinery of circulating waters" but also, as a primary and useful effect, the immediate cause of the renewal of the soil; renewing also, as it removed. Mountains are mere provisions for eventual soil, stored up by the Creator for the production and the perpetual renewal of the agricultural surface [I, p. 154]. Macculloch appears to have sensed that soil-forming processes are in some sort of adjustment with erosional processes. In modern terms, we should speak of weathering and denudation 61 John Macculloch, Proofs and Illustrations of the Attributes of God (London, 1837), n, p. 263. 141

acting in dynamic equilibrium. If the naked rock was first covered with soil [by chemical action], thus is the existing soil for ever renewed, as it is forever removed. And if every shower washes down to a lower level that of the upper ones, the same effects, on a larger scale, are seen in the turbid enlargements of rivers, where the act of deposition is familiar. . . . And it is plain, that under such a system, the upper lands would soon become naked and barren, were it not for the chemical provision .vhich I have pointed out; since it is under this power, chiefly, if not solely, that the rocks constitute the fountain of perpetual supply [po 155]. Relatively few writers saw the geologic processes of erosion and deposition as forming a subsystem within the system of the hydrologic cycle. They were (and are) usually treated separately. It remains for me to mention one writer who recognized the relationship and then explicitly denied the effectiveness of the geologic segment of the cycle. He was Granville Penn. In a book called A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies (1822), Penn went beyond the Simple laudation of the hydrolOgiC cycle as evidence of divine wisdom by ascribing the cutting of valleys directly to God. According to Penn, when flood-water reached a flat plain its natural tendency was to spread out. Flood-water could only flow in confined channels as rivers where the trenches were already in existence. That people believed otherwise only showed a confusion of cause for effect and a lack of perspicacity in field observation. However, to those who subscribed to Mosaic geology and to the philosophy of Newton and Bacon, it was God who "cut out the rivers among the rocks (Job, 28:10)" and "sent the springs into the valleys (Psalms, 104: 10)." The appeal to Moses, Newton, and Bacon as comparable authorities all speaking for the same side must now seem to us unusual. Penn continued: Nor did the consequence, and therefore the end of this admirable arrangement, escape their discernment; for 'all the rivers run into the sea; yet, the sea is not full; from the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.' The first direction of the waters, from their sources into 142

the valleys; their process from the valleys along the plains, and below the surface of the plains to their respective seas; from which general receptacle they are again raised by evaporation into clouds, which are returned by the winds to the mountain chains, and, in the form of rain, or snow, continually replenish the sources, in perpetual circulation; constitute a system so profoundly stamped with the characters of intelligence and power, that they can never be attributed by any one, whose mind is in the smallest degree imbued with Bacon'S or Newton's philosophy, to any other cause, than that which originally caused the universal system of animal and vegetable life which that circulation of waters is destined to sustain . . . . 62 Penn criticized D' Aubuisson for suggesting the erosional origin of the valley system; it would have been much more apt, he thought, to compare the circulation of waters to the vascular system of animals and vegetables. Is it not astonishing [that one should ascribe] the admirable and stupendous fluvial system to the same blind cause which furrows a sloping footpath after a violent shower; rather than to the Intelligent Cause, which contrived and executed the vascular system in created animals and vegetables? [P.379,] The well-watered earth. The linkage of topographic changes brought about by streams to the general circulation of air and water was a weak one compared with the association between the hydrologic cycle and the belief in the widespread occurrence of well-watered land. We have noted how the belief arose in the course of the Burnet-Keill controversy. Throughout the eighteenth century and in at least the first half of the nineteenth century, whenever the circulation of water was praised it was praised because it provided the mechanism for the fertilization of the land. If scholars at the end of the eighteenth century had wanted to know the extent of deserts in the world, they could 62Granville Penn, A Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies (London, 1822), pp. 377-378. 143

have obtained a fairly accurate picture from the descriptive geographies of travellers and explorers. But on the whole they chose to ignore them, not only the apologists but also scholars without overt theological bias like James Hutton. It has been pointed out that our acceptance of the extent of dry climates in the world is remarkably late, and that this was in part due to the dominance of the Greek temperature zones in climatologic thinking. The doctrine of the providence of God and the justification of that doctrine on the basis of the hydrologic cycle was another factor that led to the slighting of the dry lands. It should also be added that scholars of northwestern Europe were helped in their delusion by the well-watered-and even drenchedlandscapes they saw constantly about them. There are of course exceptions. Bernhard Varenius lived in a country wrested from water and constantly threatened by it. Nevertheless his awareness of alien scenes such as deserts was remarkable-to the extent of classifying them into different types: sandy, stony, and heath-covered. In contrast, for example, to. Hutton who, almost a century and a half after Varenius' death, saw truly dry areas only in one or two spots, Varenius acknowledged their presence over broad expanses of Africa, Arabia, and Inner Asia. 63 In eighteenth-century England the idea of a well-watered earth was an unexamined article of faith to those who have fallen for the persuasiveness of the hydrologic cycle and to those who have allowed themselves to generalize from very limited experience. We may take it that the Scottish poet James Thomson displayed a not uncommon attitude when he characterized "nature's universal robe" as "green. "64 However, a philosophical Deist like Shaftesbury could affc'd to acknowledge the existence of "vast Deserts, " and even to rejoice in them for to Shaftesbury no part of the entire "map of nature" was unworthy of reverence. In the nineteenth century it became increasingly difficult to ignore the existence of deserts as the size and nature of these barren areas were better and more Widely known. A book written for popular consumption called Curiosities of Physical Geography and published in 1845 gave the extent of the Sahara as two 63Bernhardus Varenius, Cosmography and Geography . . . (London, 1682), p. 56. 64James Thomson, Seasons, I, 83; first published, 1730. 144

and a-half million square miles or more than two-thirds of the area of Europe. 65 Jefferys Taylor's A New Description of the Earth, considered chiefly as a residence for man (1832) drew attention to the fact that, "A very large portion of Mrica is like nothing so much as a boundless sea of burning sand!" To make sure that the point was taken he went on to elaborate: "Tracts of land of prodigious extent are there composed not of earth or clay, moistened, as in England, with waters from showers and springs; but of dry, dusty, and dazzling sand, heated so constantly by the rays of the sun, as to scorch and blister, in the most dreadful degree, the feet of the wretched travellers in those fierce deserts. "66 Since Taylor's book was written largely with the intent to demonstrate the wisdom of God, the large deserts presented an awkward problem. He resolved it rather lamely by claiming "it is seldom the case that the natives of any country, however severe the climate and barren the soil, are discontented with it" (p. 86). Of interest aisc is the section on the hydrologic cycle that appears fewer than twenty pages later in the same book; here Taylor pushed the deserts into the background and argued, as had so many before and after him, that "the prodigious ocean is no larger than is needful to supply that immense treasury of the clouds, whereby the surface of the four continents is to be in turn visited and supplied" (p. 103). By the middle of the nineteenth century the distribution and approximate size of the various deserts were known in some detail. The Berghaus atlas and that of A. K. Johnston revealed the extent of knowledge in the first part of the nineteenth century. The Berghaus hyetographic plate of 1841 showed three "rainless districts" as well as several other areas of low rainfall in the southern hemisphere. The plate was reproduced with minor modifications by Johnston in 1848. The two largest "rainless districts"-the Sahara-Persian desert and the Shamo (Gobi)were estimated to have areas of three and two million square miles respectively. 67 Among books Mary Somerville's Physical 65W. Wittich, Curiosities of Physical Geography (London, 1845), p. 157. 66Jefferys Taylor, A New Description of the Earth, . . . (London, 1832), p. 84. 67 A. K. Johnston, The Physical Atlas (Edinburgh, 1848). The IfHyetographic or Rain Map of the World" is based on H. Berghaus' Hyetographische Karte der Erde (Gotha, 1841). 145

Geography portrayed realistically the prevalence of drought over enormous tracts of land. She described the air in the interior of North America, ASia, and New Holland as continually dry, and said that much of Africa was "doomed to perpetual sterility. ,,68 Against the amount of factual information that was available, it is indeed surprising that so many writers, some regarded as distinguished men of science by their contemporaries, could so blandly overlook an awkward fact in their attachment to the concept of the hydrologic cycle and to the theological comforts it sustained. The "wonderful and unceasing circulation" of water continued to exercise a certain fascination for scholars in the later half of the century. Elisee Reclus, Archibald Geikie, T. H, Huxley, and N. S. Shaler have all written of it in varying degrees of eloquence; although their language was, on the whole, more subdued than those who lived a generation earlier, But in the middle of the nineteenth century the contemplation of the ceaseless movement of water in the service of all living creatures, and in particular of men, could still call forth an uninhibited paean. And, moreover, the use of an elevated style to deliver the bare facts of geography (as we now see them) did not seem out of place to a sophisticated audience. In 1849 Arnold Guyot, the well-known Swiss professor of physical geography and history, gave a series of lectures in Boston on "The Earth and Man." Though the lectures were delivered in French they commanded a large and attentive American audience, and they were thought to have sufficient interest to warrant translation and publication in the newspapers the following day. Guyot began his lectures by claiming inorganic nature for the service of organized nature, the whole globe for man, and all for God. On the theme of the hydrologic cycle he asked his audience to look upon the continents and oceans as more than simply related by geographical contiguity: At present, gentlemen, we know in their characters and in their contrast, the continental hemisphere and the oceanic hemisphere; the land and the water. . . . We are so much in the habit of these two elements, the dry and the moist, pervading and 68Mary Somerville, Physical Geography (3rd edition; London, 1851), II, p. 58. 146

penetrating one another, that we have some difficulty in figuring to ourselves a state of things wherein the two spheres would be total strangers. We forget that it is to the ocean we owe these beneficent rains, which refresh and vivify all nature; those springs which quench our thirst; those streams and rivers which fertilize our valleys and our plains . . . we scarcely dream that if the ocean ceased to send to the continents the supply of water necessary to their daily life, the parched and arid earth would soon see all the organized beings that live upon its surface perish in pain and anguish. 69

69 Arnold Guyot, The Earth and Man (Boston, 1851), pp. 129130.

147

POSTSCRIPT

The need to rationalize surface configurations so that they can be shown to illustrate Wisdom declined noticeably in the second half of the nineteenth century. Popular expositions on the wise economy of nature still sought the support of the hydrologic cycle; Thomas Huxley himself nodded in the direction of Ecclesiastes. But philosophical debate in the later part of the nineteenth century veered sharply from traditional themes as a result of the explosive ideas introduced by Charles Darwin. A new notion of fitness, dynamic and evolutionary, came into being which bore little resemblance to the older concepts of fitness and order in nature, and of divine providence. Before the Darwinian thesis took hold, to educated Europeans nature appeared mainly in two aspects: as God's creation and therefore infinitely pliable to the exigencies of His mood, and as God's creation and therefore reflecting, however dimly, His own perfection. The first aspect shows God as the omnipotent law-giver. Both man and nature are subject to His wrath, a fact reflected in the list of cataclysmic events in both earth and human history. The second aspect reveals God as eternal wisdom, symbolized by the circle. These two world-views are deeply rooted in the ancient civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. We may label the one Hebraic and the other Greek. They have never been successfully reconciled. In the same author, and indeed often in the same book, they appear incongruously side by side. The stars in their unchanging circular courses display the wisdom and eternity of God. The earth, however, reveals a Creator who has been obliged to interfere, from time to time, with the course of nature by special decree. In the second half of the seventeenth century the circle of perfection still had its supporters although it was widely rumored to be out of shape. The planets no longer have circular courses but a Cambridge mathematician, even as late as 1696, could still assert that all the planetary orbits are either truly circular or ''not very much different from the same." The end of the seventeenth century was also a time when the geometric 149

harmonies of the earth were being vigorously advocated. One could not claim the earth as possessing the harmony of a perfect sphere; the mountains and the seas plead too obviously otherwise But one could claim for the earth a sort of higher harmony based on the concept of the hydrologic cycle. We have seen how this claim was persistently pursued until the middle of the nineteenth century. When the scholar harboring two world-views, Hebraic and Greek, confined his attention to the earth, their incompatibility could hardly be ignored much longer. Yet for a time it was. Thus William Buckland was a catastrophist when he looked into the past configurations of the earth; but in contemplating the present arrangement of land and sea, mountain and valley, he could only see-through the conceptual spectacles of the hydrologic cycle-perfect harmony. Charles Lyell, James Hutton, and John Playfair may be said to have given up the Hebraic God when they projected the harmonies of the present into the past. Hutton and Playfair, in particular, have reinforced the harmonies of the earth by adding the denudational cycles to the hydrologic cycle. Both have praised the hydrologic cycle as manifesting divine wisdom. To them, the denudational cycle too displayed ''beautiful economy." When an astronomer contemplates the planets he may well say that, in their orbits, he can find "no vestige of a beginning, -no prospect of an end. " But it was of the earth that Hutton offered this much-quoted observation; there lay his claim to originality. The earth at last acquired a degree of the cyclic perfection that formerly could be discerned only in the heavens. When the planetary orbits were found to be imperfectly circular, only the purely geometric face of the circle was marred .. Circle in the dynamic sense of "cycle" remained a valid interpretation of nature and of natural events. The cycle has neither beginning nor end. A world consisting solely of cyclic events is a perfectly ordered world, no more subject to progressive change than perfection or God. The circle was broken by the New Astronomy. For a time, one could still see in the cycle the manifestation of God's wisdom. In the later part of the nineteenth century, with the rise of Darwin's theory of evolution, the cycle too was rendered awry by the anisotropic pressure of geologic time. 0

150

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