a multitude of
boiling hot springs from which water is let into ditches surrounding
gardens and vineyards, and this water becomes an incrustation of stone
at the end of a year. Hence, every year they construct banks of earth to
the right and left, let in the water, and thus out of these
incrustations make walls for their fields. This seems due to natural
causes, since there is a juice having a coagulating potency like rennet
underground in those spots and in that country. When this potency
appears above ground mingled with spring water, the mixture cannot but
be hardened by the heat of the sun and air, as appears in salt pits.

11. There are also springs which issue exceedingly bitter, owing to a
bitter juice in the soil, such as the river Hypanis in Pontus. For about
forty miles from its source its taste is very sweet; then it reaches a
point about one hundred and sixty miles from its mouth, where it is
joined by a very small brook. This runs into it, and at once makes that
vast river bitter, for the reason that the water of the brook becomes
bitter by flowing through the kind of soil and the veins in which there
are sandarach mines.

12. These waters are given their different flavours by the properties of
the soil, as is also seen in the case of fruits. If the roots of trees,
vines, or other plants did not produce their fruits by drawing juices
from soil of different properties, the flowers of all would be of the
same kind in all places and districts. But we find in the island of
Lesbos the protropum wine, in Maeonia, the catacecaumenites, in Lydia,
the Tmolian, in Sicily, the Mamertine, in Campania, the Falernian,
between Terracina and Fondi, the Caecuban, and wines of countless
varieties and qualities produced in many other places. This could not be
the case, were it not that the juice of the soil, introduced with its
proper flavours into the roots, feeds the stem, and, mounting along it
to the top, imparts a flavour to the fruit which is peculiar to its
situation and kind.

13. If soils were not different and unlike in their kinds of juices,
Syria and Arabia would not be the only places in which the reeds,
rushes, and all the plants are aromatic, and in which there are trees
bearing frankincense or yielding pepper berries and lumps of myrrh, nor
would assafoetida be found only in the stalks growing in Cyrene, but
everything would be of the same sort, and produced in the soil of all
countries. It is the inclinat