SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. 473 
The progress of the emphatically modern science of geology 
has corrected these erroneous views, because the observations 
on which it depends have demonstrated not only the existence, 
but the movement, of water in nearly all geological formations, 
have collected evidence of the presence of large reservoirs at 
greater or less depths beneath surfaces of almost every char- 
acter, and have investigated the rationale of the attendant 
phenomena.* The distribution of these waters has been 
minutely studied with reference to a great number of local- 
ities, and though the actual mode and rate of their vertical 
and horizontal transmission is still involved in much obscurity, 
the laws which determine their aggregation are so well under- 
stood, that, when the geology of a given district is known, 
it is not difficult to determine at what depth water will be 
reached by the borer, and to what height it will rise. 
The same principles have been successfully applied to the 
discovery of small subterranean collections or currents of water, 
and some persons have acquired, by a moderate knowledge 
of the superficial structure of the earth combined with 
long practice, a skill in the selection of favorable places for 
digging wells which seems to common observers little less 
in mountains hundreds of miles distant, pour forth from the earth with a 
volume sufficient to permit steamboats to ascend to their basins of eruption. 
In January, 1857, a submarine fresh-water river burst from the bottom of 
the sea not far from the southern extremity of the peninsula, and for a 
whole month discharged a current not inferior in volume to the river Missis- 
sippi, or eleven times the mean delivery of the Po, and more than six times 
that of the Nile. We can explain this phenomenon only by supposing that the 
bed of the sea was suddenly burst up by the hydrostatic upward pressure of 
the water in a deep reservoir communicating with some great subterranean 
river or receptacle in the mountains of Georgia or of Cuba, or perhaps even 
in the valley of the Mississippi.—THomassy, Hssai sur  Hydrologie. 
Late southern journals inform us that the creek under the Natural Bridge 
in Virginia has suddenly disappeared, being swallowed up by newly formed 
fissures, of unknown depth, in its channel. It does not appear that an outlet 
for the waters thus absorbed has been discovered, and it is not improbable 
that they are fillmg some underground cavity like that which supplied the 
submarine river just mentioned. 
* See especially StopPant, Corso di Geologia, i., pp. 270 et segq. 
