THE DRIFT OF THE SEA. 251 



picions are true in regard to the northerly set. I shall look with 

 much interest for a description of the ' currents' in this part of the 

 ocean." 



545. In latitude 38° south, longitude 6° east, he found the wa- 

 ter at 56°. His course thence was a little to the south of east, to 

 the meridian of 41° east, at its intersection with the parallel of 42° 

 south. Here his water thermometer stood at 50°, but between 

 these two places it ranged at 60° and upward, being as high on the 

 parallel of 39° as 73°. Here, therefore, was a stream — a mighty 

 "river in the ocean" — one thousand six hundred miles across from 

 east to w^est, having v^' ater in the middle of it 23° higher than at 

 the sides. This is truly a Gulf Stream contrast. What an im- 

 mense escape of heat from the Indian Ocean, and what an influx 

 of warm water into the frozen regions of the south ! This stream 

 is not always as broad nor as warm as Captain Grant found it. 

 At its mean stage it conforms more nearly to the limits assigned 

 it in the diagram (Plate IX.). 



546. We have, in the volume of heated water reported by Cap- 

 tain Grant, v^ho is a close and accurate observer, an illustration of 

 the sort of spasmodic efforts — the heaves and throes — which the 

 sea, in the performance of its ceaseless task, has sometimes to 

 make. By some means, the equilibrium of its w^aters, at the time 

 of Captain Grant's passage, December — the southern summer — 

 1852, appears to have been disturbed to an unusual extent ; hence 

 this mighty rush of overheated waters from the great inter-tropical 

 caldron of the two oceans down toward the south. 



Instances of commotion in the sea at uncertain intervals — the 

 making, as it were, of efforts by fits and starts to keep up to time 

 in the performance of its manifold offices — are not unfrequent, nor 

 are they inaptly likened to spasms. The sudden disruption of the 

 ice w^hich arctic voyagers tell of, the immense bergs which occa- 

 sionally appear in groups near certain latitudes, the variable char- 

 acter of all the currents of the sea — now fast, now slow, now run- 

 ning this w^ay, then that — may be taken as so many signs of the 

 tremendous throes which occur in the bosom of the ocean. Some- 

 times the sea recedes from the shore, as if to gather strength for 

 a great rush against its barriers, as it did when it fled back to join 

 with the earthquake and overw'helm Callao in 1746, and again Lis- 

 bon nine years afterward. The tide-rir\s in mid ocoun, tlic waves 



