256 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. 



mix up with them a grain of the finest sand, nor the smallest par- 

 ticle of gravel torn from the loose beds of debris that here and 

 there strew the bottom of the sea. This plateau is not too deep 

 for the wire to sink down and rest upon, yet it is not so shallow 

 that currents, or icebergs, or any abrading force can derange the 

 wire after it is once lodged upon it. 



722. As Professor Bailey remarks, the animalculge, whose re- 

 mains Brooke's lead has brought up from the bottom of the deep 

 sea, probably did not live or die there. They would have had no 

 light there, and, had they lived there, their frail little textures would 

 have been subjected in their growth to a pressure upon them of a 

 column of water twelve thousand feet high, equal to the weight 

 of four hundred atmospheres. They probably lived and sported 

 near the surface, where they could feel the genial influence of both 

 light and heat, and were buried in the lichen caves below after 

 death. 



723. Brooke's lead and the microscope, therefore, it would seem, 

 are about to teach us to regard the ocean in a new light. Its bo- 

 som, which so teems with animal life ; its face, upon which time 

 writes no wrinkles — makes no impression — are, it would now seem, 

 as obedient to the great law of change as is any department what- 

 ever, either of the animal or the vegetable kingdom. It is now 

 suggested that henceforward we should view the surface of the 

 sea as a nursery teeming with nascent organisms, its depths as the 

 cemetery for families of living creatures that outnumber the sands 

 on the sea-shore for multitude. 



724. Where there is a nursery, hard by there will be found also 

 a grave-yard — such is the condition of the animal world. But it 

 never occurred to us before to consider the surface of the sea as 

 one wide nursery, its every ripple as a cradle, and its bottom one 

 vast burial-place. 



725. On those parts of the solid portions of the earth's crust 

 which are at the bottom of the atmosphere, various agents are at 

 work, leveling both upward and downward. Heat and cold, rain 

 and sunshine, the winds and the streams, all, assisted by the forces 

 of gravitation, are unceasingly wasting away the high places on 

 the land, and as perpetually fiUing up the low. 



