256 PHYSICAL GEOGKAPHY OF THE SEA, AND ITS STETEOROLOGY. 



imcombined and simple state, is not gaseous or volatile. Now was 

 the feldspar of the granite originally formed in one heap, the mica 

 in another, and the quartz in a third, and then the three brought 

 together by some mighty power, and welded into the granite rock 

 for the everlasting hills to stand upon ? or were they, as they were 

 formed of the chaotic matter, made into rock ? Sea water is com- 

 posed of oxygen and hydrogen, and its salts, like the granite, also 

 consist of gases and volatile metals. But whether the constituents 

 of sea water, like those of the primitive rocks, were brought to- 

 gether in the original process of formation, and united in combina- 

 tion as we now find them in the ocean, or whether the sea was fresh 

 "in the beginning," and became salt by some subsequent process, 

 is not material to om* present purpose. Some geologists suppose 

 that in the chalk period, when the ammonites, with their huge 

 chambered shells, lived in the sea, the carbonaceous material re- 

 quired by these creatures for their habitations must have been more 

 abundant in its waters than it now is ; but, though the constituents 

 of sea water may have varied as to proportions, they probably were 

 never, at least " since its waters commenced to bring forth," widely 

 different from what they now are. It is true, the strange cuttle- 

 fish, with its shell twelve feet in circumference, is no longer found 

 alive in the sea : it died out with the chalk period ; but then its 

 companion, the tiny nautilus, remains to tell us that even in that 

 remote period the proportion of salt in sea water was not unsuited 

 to its health, for it and the coral insect have lived through all the 

 changes that om- planet has undergone since the sea was inhabited, 

 and they tell us that its waters were salt as far back, at least, as 

 their records extend, for they now build their edifices and make 

 their habitations of the same materials, collected in the same way 

 that they did then, and, had the sea been fresh in the interim, they 

 too would have perished, and their family would have become ex- 

 tinct, hke that of the great ammonite, which perhaps ceased to find 

 the climates of the sea, not the proportion of its salts, suited to its 

 well-being. 



495. Did any one who maintains that the salts of the sea were 

 Cubic miles of sea Originally washed down into it by the rivers and the 

 sa't- rains ever take the trouble to compute the quantity 



of solid matter that the sea holds in solution as salts ? Talnng the 

 average depth of the ocean at three miles, and its ^average saltness 

 at 3 J per cent., it appears that there is salt enough in the sea to 

 cover to the thickness of one mile an area of several millions of 



