THE SEA IN THE LIFE OF THE NATIONS. 



By Alfred Kirchoff. 



[A lecture delivered at the "Institut fur Meereskunde," at Berlin."] 



The only absolute power on earth is the sea. The bosom of the 

 deep brought forth land itself, whose insular fragments only here and 

 there break the continuity of the all-embracing- ocean. The sea alone 

 constitutes ;i whole between the atmospheric envelope and the mineral 

 crust of the earth, and essentially the earth is still a planet surrounded 

 by the ocean. Again, organic life in its mysterious origins must be 

 explained as a pregnant result produced by the sea and its movements, 

 at the period in which there was no hind, and a single unbroken ocean 

 inclosed the terrestrial sphere as a shell, similar to the atmospheric 

 envelope in turn inclosing the ocean. And if, indeed, evolution of 

 life on earth follows a uniform plan, then even vegetable and animal 

 forms on land, including man himself, are descended from marine 

 ancestors. 



However, in the course of reons, land animals adapted themselves 

 to conditions outside the ocean, and so a vast chasm gradually arose 

 between creatures of the land and of the sea. Rivers and lakes, by 

 their nature elements of the land related to the ocean, do, indeed, in 

 exceptional instances blur the sharp boundaries confining the fauna 

 world of the sea. Some fish, like the eel and the salmon, live in either 

 salt or fresh water, and some sea-fish gradually accustom themselves 

 to the water at the mouths of rivers, which is less salt than that of the 

 open sea, and, finally, their descendants, swimming upstream, remain 

 in fresh water permanently- The little coelentera, for instance, in 

 recent years passed from the North Sea, through the brackish waters 

 at the mouth of the Elbe, into the Elbe and Saale, and even reached 

 the fresh-water lake at Eisleben. Seals bear on land; sea-birds with 

 great powers of flight, like the frigate-bird and the albatross, ply their 

 mighty wings over the sea thousands of kilometers away from the 

 coast, for days at a time. Nevertheless, in the dispersion of living 

 creatures the coast remains the sharpest dividing line, and it is obvious 



:i Translated from GeographiHche Zeitschrift, Leipzig, 1901, pp. 241-250. 



389 



