THE SEA 5 



near to the west coast of Europe. This idea per- 

 sisted until the time of Columbus and had much to 

 do with the voyages of Columbus. Men like Vasco 

 da Gama, Magellan, and Cook, who came after 

 Columbus, learned much about the sea; but, during 

 the last hundred years, oceanographers with a 

 knowledge of the modern sciences of physics, chem- 

 istry, astronomy, and biology have vastly increased 

 our knowledge of the ocean. Edward Forbes, C. 

 Wyville Thomson, John Murray, Louis and Alex- 

 ander Agassiz, the Prince of Monaco, Anton Dohrn, 

 Johann Hjort, William A. Herdman, and others 

 have cleared up many of the mysteries of the briny 

 deep. These men have amassed an amazing amount 

 of information concerning the sea, which would 

 require a lifetime of study to master. The reports 

 of the Challenger expedition alone fill fifty large 

 quarto volumes. Therefore, in an account such as 

 this, we shall be able to consider only a few of the 

 most interesting facts concerning the ocean. 



Area and Depth of the Ocean 



Few of us have an accurate conception of the size 

 of the sea. A long voyage impresses the average 

 person with the great size of the ocean compared 

 to that of the land. The sea is 139,000,000 square 

 miles in area, and covers about seventy per cent of i^ 

 the surface of the earth. 



The globe may be divided into a land hemisphere, 

 with its pole near London, and a water hemisphere, 

 having its pole near New Zealand. The former 



