THERMAL SPRINGS. 195 



has been occasionally detected. The hot spring waters, 

 which, during their long and tortuous course, take up such 

 a variety of constituents from the rocks with which they 

 are in contact, and often carry them to places where they 

 are deficient in the strata through which the springs burst 

 forth, have also an action of a totally different nature. They 

 exert a transforming and at the same time a formative ac- 

 tivity, and in this respect they are of great geognostic im- 

 portance. Senarmont has shown with wonderful acuteness 

 how extremely probable it is that many vein-crevices (an- 

 cient courses of thermal waters) have been filled from below 

 upward by the deposition of the dissolved elements. By 

 changes of pressure and temperature, by internal electro- 

 chemical processes, and the specific attraction of the lateral 

 walls (the rock traversed), sometimes lamellar deposits, and 

 sometimes masses of concretion are produced in fissures and 

 vesicular cavities. In this way druses and porous amygda- 

 loids appear to have been sometimes formed. Where the 

 deposition of the veins has taken place in parallel zones, these 

 zones usually correspond with each other symmetrically in 

 their nature, both vertically and laterally. Senarmont has 

 succeeded in preparing a considerable number of minerals 

 artificially, by perfectly analogous synthetical methods.! 



Tartarus. A young and learned philologist, Theodor Schwab, suc- 

 ceeded a few years ago, with great exertion, in penetrating to the 

 rocky wall from which the spring trickles down, exactly as described 

 by Homer, Hesiod, and Herodotus. He drank some of the water, 

 which was extremely cold, but very pure to the taste, without per- 

 ceiving any injurious effects (Schwab, Arkadien, seine Natur und Ge- 

 schichte, 1852, s. 15-20). Among the ancients it was asserted that the 

 coldness of the water of the Styx burst all vessels except those made 

 of the hoof of an ass. The legends of the Styx are certainly very old, 

 but the report of the poisonous properties of its spring appears to have 

 been widely disseminated only in the time of Aristotle. According 

 to a statement of Antigonus of Carystus (Hist. Mirab., § 174), it was 

 contained very circumstantially in a book of Theophrastus, which has 

 been lost to us. The calumnious fable of the poisoning of Alexander 

 by the water of the Styx, which Aristotle communicated to Cassander 

 by Antipater, w r as contradicted by Plutarch and Arrian, and dissem- 

 inated by Vitruvius, Justin, and Quintus Curtius, but without men- 

 tioning the Stagirite (Stahr, AristoteUa, th. i., 1830, s. 137-140). 

 Pliny (xxx., 53) says, somewhat ambiguously: "Magna Aristotelis 

 infamia excogitatum." See Ernst Curtius, Peloponnesus (1851), bd. 

 i., s. 194-196, and 212; St. Croix, Examen Critique des Anciens His- 

 toriens d' Alexandre, p. 49G. A representation of the cascade of the 

 Styx, drawn from a distance, is contained in Fiedler's Reise durch 

 Griechenland, th. i., s. 400. 



* " Very important metalliferous lodes, perhaps the greater num- 



