TERRESTEIAL PHENOMENA. 57 



which cannot be identified, and states that the Nile rises in 

 the so-called Silver Mountains. 



The question of the position of the source of the Nile 

 was discussed by many of the ancient writers, especially 

 Hecataeus, Herodotus, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, and it 

 came to be believed that it lay among the so-called Mountains 

 of the Moon, the locality of which was shifted from time to 

 time, until Stanley identified them with the great Kuwenzori 

 Mountains, westwards of the Victoria Nyanza. 



After referring to several well-known rivers of Greece, 

 Macedonia, and Thrace, and to streams in Arcadia which 

 disappeared underground, Aristotle gives some interesting 

 information about the Caspian Sea. He says that, at the 

 foot of the Caucasus, is a lake which the people near it call 

 a sea, that it has no evident outlet, and that it empties 

 itself underground at Coraxi into the Black Sea, near the 

 so-called " deeps," which had not been fathomed. Here, 

 according to him, at a distance of about thirty-five miles 

 from land, the sea yields fresh water in three places. 



It is evident that Aristotle understood that the Caspian 

 was a large inland sea. After the campaigns of Alexander, 

 many believed that it communicated with an ocean to the 

 north, and von Humboldt, commenting on this view, says 

 that, fortunately, Aristotle wrote his MeteorologT/ before 

 those campaigns, for the Macedonian expedition gave rise 

 to some errors which long held their ground.* 



Kespecting the belief, expressed by Aristotle, about an 

 underground connection between the Caspian and the Black 

 Sea, some interesting information is given by Keclus. Ac- 

 cording to him, navigators of the Caspian and the Turkoman 

 nomads who wander on its shores have been astonished at 

 the river of salt water which constantly flows through a 

 narrow channel into the Karaboghaz, which forms a kind of 

 inland sea, on its eastern side. In the view of the natives 

 this inland sea could be nothing but an abyss, a "black gulf," 

 as is expressed by the name Karaboghaz, into which the 

 waters of the Caspian dive down in order to flow by sub- 

 terranean channels into the Persian Gulf or the Black Sea. 

 It is, perhaps, to some vague rumours, Eeclus says, as to the 

 existence of the Karaboghaz that we must attribute the 

 statement of Aristotle about the strange gulfs in the Black 

 Sea in which the waters of the Caspian bubble up after their 



* Cosmos^ Bohn's Library, vol. ii. p. 560. 



