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Athanasius Kircher |
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| b. Geisa,
Germany, 2 May 1602; d. Rome, 28 November 1680 He had extensive education and, like his other five brothers, entered a religious order, probably because the family was too poor to pay for an education. Kircher went to a great number of Jesuit institutions where he learned Greek, Latin, and studied humanities, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, and theology, receiving a doctorate in Divinity. He became a Jesuit in 1618. This prolific Jesuit priest polymath wrote, in what is probably the first printed work on speleology, that ‘There is also in the landscape of Krain [Carniola?] close to the town Haubach a huge field from which each year during Spring time a large body of water containing fish bursts forth with the result that in a few days it transforms the field into a lake teeming with fish (...) in Switzerland rivers rise from the caves of the mountains, that flow from May until September, but stop the rest of the time (...) as they come out of the mountains, are full of fish, which is clear proof that they [the fish] emerge from subterranean waters along the rivers (...) it is not implausible that, as under the earth all kind of fishes occur and live’ (Kircher 1665, 2:85). These references to subterranean fishes, however, are vague unsubstantiated, and given Kircher’s reputation as an uncritical repeater of other people’s tales, highly suspect (Romero 2000). Furthermore, he makes no reference to features associated with troglomorphic fishes: blindness and depigmentation. . This figure, from Mundus Subterraneus, depicts Kircher's ideas about the origin of freshwaters from caves. |
  Portrait of Kircher Cover Page of Mundus Subterraneus
Alleged creature which, according to Kircher, inhabits caves. |
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