Meteorology   

rivers in Arcadia. The reason is that Arcadia is mountainous and there

are no channels from its valleys to the sea. So these places get

full of water, and this, having no outlet, under the pressure of the

water that is added above, finds a way out for itself underground.

In Greece this kind of thing happens on quite a small scale, but the

lake at the foot of the Caucasus, which the inhabitants of these parts

call a sea, is considerable. Many great rivers fall into it and it has

no visible outlet but issues below the earth off the land of the

Coraxi about the so-called 'deeps of Pontus'. This is a place of

unfathomable depth in the sea: at any rate no one has yet been able to

find bottom there by sounding. At this spot, about three hundred

stadia from land, there comes up sweet water over a large area, not

all of it together but in three places. And in Liguria a river equal

in size to the Rhodanus is swallowed up and appears again elsewhere:

the Rhodanus being a navigable river.



14



The same parts of the earth are not always moist or dry, but they

change according as rivers come into existence and dry up. And so

the relation of land to sea changes too and a place does not always

remain land or sea throughout all time, but where there was dry land

there comes to be sea, and where there is now sea, there one day comes

to be dry land. But we must suppose these changes to follow some order

and cycle. The principle and cause of these changes is that the

interior of the earth grows and decays, like the bodies of plants

and animals. Only in the case of these latter the process does not

go on by parts, but each of them necessarily grows or decays as a

whole, whereas it does go on by parts in the case of the earth. Here

the causes are cold and heat, which increase and diminish on account

of the sun and its course. It is owing to them that the parts of the

earth come to have a different character, that some parts remain moist