72 MATTHEW FONTAINE MAURY 



matter; it is a laboratory for purification, in which that 

 matter is recompounded, and wrought again into whole- 

 some and healthful shapes; it is a machine for pumping 

 up all the rivers from the sea, and conveying the waters 

 from their fountains on the ocean to their sources in the 

 mountains; it is an inexhaustible magazine, marvellously 

 adapted for many benign and beneficent pur- 

 poses. . . . To evaporate water enough annually from 

 the ocean to cover the earth, on the average, five feet 

 with rain ; to transport it from one zone to another ; and 

 to precipitate it in the right places, at suitable times, 

 and in the proportions due, is one of the offices of the 

 grand atmospheric machine. This water is evaporated 

 principally from the torrid zone. Supposing it all to 

 come thence, we shall have, encircling the earth, a belt 

 of ocean three thousand miles in breadth, from which 

 this atmosphere evaporates a layer of water annually 

 sixteen feet in depth. And to hoist up as high as the 

 clouds, and lower again all the water in a lake sixteen 

 feet deep, and three thousand miles broad, and twenty- 

 four thousand long, is the yearly business of this invisible 

 machinery. What a powerful engine is the atmosphere ! 

 and how nicely adjusted must be all the cogs, and wheels, 

 and springs, and compensations of this exquisite piece of 

 machinery, that it never wears out nor breaks down, nor 

 fails to do its work at the right time, and in the right 

 way". 



One other selection, from the chapter on 'The Salts of 

 the Sea", will be sufficient as illustrative material. 

 "Take for example", he writes, "the coral islands, 

 reefs, beds, and atolls, with which the Pacific Ocean is 

 studded and garnished. They were built up of materials 

 which a certain kind of insect quarried from the sea 



