248 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. 



ume of warm waters to the southward of the Aleutian Islands, is 

 not unlike that which the cool waters from Davis's Straits make 

 in the Atlantic upon the Gulf Stream. As I write, I receive from 

 Captain N. B. Grant the abstract log of the American ship Lady 

 Arbella, bound from Hamburg to New York, in May, 1854. In 

 sailing through this "horse-shoe," or bend in the Gulf Stream 

 (^ 522), he passed, from daylight to noon, twenty-four large 

 "bergs," besides several small ones, "the whole ocean, as far 

 as the eye could reach, being literally covered with them." " I 

 should," he continues, "judge the average height of them above 

 the surface of the sea to be about sixty feet ; some five or six of 

 them were at least twice that height, and, with their frozen peaks 

 jutting up in the most fantastic shapes, presented a truly sublime 

 spectacle." 



540. This " horse-shoe" of cold in the warm water of the North 

 Pacific, though extending 5 degrees farther toward the south, can 

 not be the harbor for such icebergs. The cradle of those of the 

 Atlantic was perhaps in the Frozen Ocean, for they may have 

 come thence through Baffin's Bay. But in the Pacific there is no 

 nursery for them. The water in Behring's Strait is too shallow 

 to let them pass from that ocean into the Pacific, and the climates 

 of Russian America do not favor the formation of large bergs. 

 But, though we do not find in the North Pacific the physical con- 

 ditions which generate icebergs like those of the Atlantic, w^ find 

 them as abundant with fogs. The line of separation between the 

 warm and cold water assures us of these conditions. 



541. What beautiful, grand, and benign ideas do we not see ex- 

 pressed in that immense body of warm waters which are gathered 

 together in the middle of the Pacific and Indian Oceans !* It is 

 the womb of the sea. In it, coral islands innumerable have been 

 fashioned, and pearls formed in "great heaps ;" there, multitudes 

 of living things, countless in numbers and infinite in variety, are 

 hourly conceived. With space eiiough to hold the four conti- 

 nents and to spare, its tepid waters teem with nascent organ- 

 isms.! They sometimes swarm so thickly there that they change 



* See Appendix I. 



t " It is the realm of reef-building corals, and of the wondrously-beautiful assem- 

 blage of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, that live among them or prey upon thefn. 

 The brightest and most definite arrangements of color are here displayed. It is the 

 *^at of maximum development of the majority of marine genera. It has but few re- 



