ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Thus was Closed the Cycle: Toward a Critical Edition of Vallisneri's Lecture on Springs

• In Event: New Perspectives on Science in the Enlightenment

English Abstract

Due to its socio-political, economic, and environmental importance, the issue of the origin of fresh water became the subject of discussion among scholars and technicians long before the new science entered the European scene. However, it was precisely the interaction between experimentalism and pre-existing theoretical and practical knowledge that marked a decisive step towards the understanding of the hydrologic cycle. Antonio Vallisneri’s Lezione accademica intorno all'origine delle fontane (Academic Lecture on the Origin of Springs, 1715) exemplifies this novel approach to the study of natural phenomena. A fertile combination of Galilean experimentalism, empiricism, field research, collaborative work, and philosophical elaboration (which also included Baconian, Cartesian, and Leibnizian motifs), this treatise supported the exclusively meteoric origin of fresh water with conclusive evidence: in doing so, the Lezione accademica dealt a lethal blow to the competing (and still far from unpopular) theories of alembics and filters which supposed the existence of hidden channels connecting the oceans to the earth and the distillation and/or filtration of sea water through rock layers.
Vallisneri’s work is an exemplary case study to explore the methodological and theoretical challenges that shaped natural philosophy along its complex, often uncertain, path. Once completed, the critical edition of the Lezione accademica will offer historians a useful document to shed light on a crucial passage in the evolution of the hydrogeological debate in Europe—and, more generally, in the evolution of early modern science.

Author

• Francesco Luzzini, University of Eastern Piedmont