Willing to solve the problem, the student managed to convince his advisor that they would have material for a monograph and started working. First, he studied everything he could about rivers. As he studied, he was writing a bibliographic review chapter. He wrote about water, cited the creation of the oceans according to Genesis, wrote about the water molecule and its components, hydrogen and oxygen, about the different ways rivers flow into the ocean (including a detailed study of the most important deltas of the world and their history) and finally concluded with a short treatise on how gravity pulls water molecules towards the center of the Earth, thus producing the flow of rivers.
At the end of this part of the research, the student was faced with the problem itself, which was the in existence of a means to cross the river. Thinking about it for a while, he remembered an instrument he had already heard about and which served to take objects from point A to point B. That instrument was the catapult.