THERMAL SPRINGS. 203 



tion of springs as far as we can ascertain from reliable ob- 

 servations, is for more remarkable thaD the instability 58 

 which 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 activity, 

 and in this respect they are of great geognostic importance. 

 Senarmont has shown with wonderful acuteness, how ex- 

 tremely probable it is that many vein-crevices (ancient courses 

 of thermal waters) have been filled from below upwards by 



58 The examples of alteration of temperature in the thermal springs 

 of Mariara and las Trincheras lead to the question whether the Styx 

 water, whose source, so difficult of access, is situated in the wild 

 Aroanie Alps of Arcadia, near Nonacris, in the district of Pheneos, has 

 lost its pernicious qualities by alteration in the subterranean fissures of 

 supply ? or whether the waters of the Styx have only occasionally been 

 injurious to the wanderer by their icy coldness ? Perhaps they are 

 indebted for their evil reputation, which has been transmitted to the 

 present inhabitants of Arcadia, only to the awful wildness and desola- 

 tion of the neighboxarhood, and to the myth of their origin from Tar- 

 tarus. A young and learned philologist, Theodor Schwab, succeeded 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 ex- 

 tremely cold, but very pure to the taste, without perceiving any injuri- 

 ous effects (Schwab, ArTcadien, seine Natur und Geschickte, 1852, s. 15 

 20). Amongst 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 dissemi- 

 nated only in the time of Aristotle. According to a statement of 

 Antigonus of Carystus (IIit. M'nab. 174), it was contained very cir- 

 cumstantially iu 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, was 

 contradicted by Plutarch and Arriau, and disseminated by Vitruvius, 

 Justin, and Quintus Curtius, but without mentioning the Stagirite 

 (Stahr, Aristotelia, Th. i, 1830, s. 137 140). Pliny (xxx, 53) says, 

 somewhat ambiguously : " Magna Aristotelia infamia excogitatum." 

 See Ernst Curtius, Pelvponnesiis (1851), Bd. i, s. 194 196, and 212; 

 St. Croix, Exainen Critique des Anciens Historiens d'Alejrandre, p. 496. 

 A representation of the cascade of the Styx, drawn from a distance, ia 

 contained in Fiedler's Reise durck Griechenland, Th. i,s. 400. 



