Early prehistoric accounts of water cycling in nature refer only to, or hint at, the atmospheric phase of the water cycle. Wherever evaporation is alluded to, it is mostly assumed to take place from rivers and the sea. Speculations on the origin of these streams or on whether or how their water returns to where the streams originated, came later in Greek antiquity. This era produced essentially four competing theories on this, namely the seawater filtration theory, the underground condensation theory, the concept of pre-existing underground primal water, likely based on mythology and less accepted by the philosophers, and the rainfall percolation theory. Although the latter contains the essence of our present understanding, it took nearly another 23 centuries before it became the only remaining one to be fully accepted. In recorded history it can be followed as a thread running through the works of the pre-Socratics, the post-Aristotelian Peripatetics, Vitruvius in ancient Rome, Buridan and other medieval Schoolmen, Bartas, Palissy, and Gassendi in the Renaissance, Mariotte, Ray, and Van Musschenbroek at the dawn of modern science, and finally Dalton in the early nineteenth century.