320 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. 



genial influences of both, light and heat, and were buried in the 

 lichen caves below after death. 



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

 The ocean in a new scem, are about to tcach us to regard the ocean in 

 ^'^''*- a new light. Its bosom, which so teems with ani- 

 mal 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 whatever 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 liv- 

 ing creatures that outnumber the sands on the sea-shore for mul- 

 titude. 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 a cradle, and its bottom 

 one vast burial-place. 



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

 Leveling agencies, which arc 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, assist- 

 ed by the forces of gravitation, are unceasingly wasting away the 

 high places on the land, and as perpetually filling up the low. 

 But in contemplating the leveling agencies that are at work upon 

 the solid portions of the crust of our planet which are at the bot- 

 tom of the sea, one is led, at first thought, almost to the conclusion 

 that these leveling agents are powerless there. In the deep sea 

 there are no abrading processes at work ; neither frosts nor rains 

 are felt there, and the force of gravitation there is so paralyzed 

 that it can not use half its power, as on dry land, in tearing the 

 overhanging rock from the precipice and casting it down into the 

 valley below. 



594. When considering the bottom of the ocean, we have, in 

 The offices of ani- ^hc imagination, been disposed to regard the waters 

 maicuise. of the sca as a great cushion, placed between the air 

 and the bottom of the ocean, to protect and defend it from these 

 abrading agencies of the atmosphere. The geological clock may, 

 we thought, strike new periods ; its hands may point to era after 

 era; but, so long as the ocean remains in its basin, so long as its 



