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Abstract:
From the publication of Aristotle’s Meteorology, until the end of the 17th Century, the description of the origin of springs and of the hydrological cycle was dominated by the scheme, according to which small springs are nourished by the precipitations, and the origin of big rivers is a continuous cycle of condensation and evaporation in the Earth depths. The acknowledgment of this second, main, internal hydrological cycle, time by time described with different schemes, was widely accepted in the European literature, until the midst of the second half of the 17th century, when, thanks to the new Galilean paradigm, Perrault’s and Mariotte’s opera were published, that – albeit Perrault’s uncertainties and afterthoughts – contributed to definitively change the perception of the hydrological cycle into the modern one, based on the external cycle.In Italy the debate was lively and involved a number of scholars, who actively or only cursorily dealt with the theme. They were pure or applied mathematicians, natural scientists, and also physicians and connoisseurs of the matter. Some of their names are Galileo’s friend and discipulus Castelli, Guglielmini, Manfredi, Montanari, Ghezzi, Vallinseri, Zendrini, to mention a few.In this work we reanalyse this debate, which slowly came to the acceptance of the new paradigm, in the light of the following transversal attitudes: (i) the relationship with the coeval French literature, (ii) the attention to the Galilean and Newtonian Mechanics, (iii) the proneness to measures and to the experimental practice, (iv) the persistencies of the Aristotelian Physics and Epistemology.
