§ 740, 741. TIDE-RIPS AND SEA DRIET. 395 



CHAPTER XYIII. 



§ 740-772. — TIDE-RIPS AND SEA DRIFT. 



740. We never tire of tlie sea ; like the atmospliere, it is a lab- 

 The glories of the sea. oratorj ill which the most exquisite processes are 

 continually going on. Its flora and its fauna, its waves and 

 its tides, its currents and its salts, all in themselves afford profit- 

 able subjects of study and charming themes for thought. But as 

 interesting as they are individually, and as marvelous too, they 

 are not half so marvelous, nor nearly so wonderful, as the offices 

 which, with their aid, the sea performs in the physical economy 

 of our planet. In this aspect the sea, with its insects, its salts, 

 and its vapors, is a machine of the most beautiful construction. 

 Its powers are vast, multitudinous, and varied. It is so stable 

 and true in its work that nothing can throw it out of gearing, and 

 yet its compensations are so delicate that the task of preserving 

 them is assigned to the tiniest of its inhabitants, and to agents 

 apparently the most subtle and fickle. They preserve its har- 

 monies and make its adjustments, in beauty and sublimity of ef- 

 fect, to vie with the glories of the heavens. 



741. There is a movement of the waters of the ocean which. 

 Drift described, though it bc a translation, yet it does not amount 



to what is known to the mariner as "current," for our nautical 

 instruments and the art of navigation have not been brought to 

 that state of perfection which will enable navigators generally to 

 detect as currents the flow to which I allude as drift. If an object 

 be set afloat in the ocean, as at the equator, it would, in the course 

 of time, even though it should not be caught up by any of the 

 known currents, find its way to the icy barriers about the poles, 

 and again back among the tepid waters of the tropics. Such an 

 object would illustrate the drift of the sea^ and by its course would 

 indicate the route which the surface-waters of the sea follow in 

 their general channels of circulation to and fro between the equa- 

 tor and the poles. 



