THE BASm AND BED OF THE ATLANTIC. 307 



bottom of the deep sea, probably did not live or die there. They 

 YvTonld have had no hght there, and, had they hved there, their 

 frail little texture would have been subjected, in its growth, to 

 the pressure of a column of water twelve thousand feet high, 

 equal to the weight of four hundred atmospheres. They pro- 

 bably lived and died near the smface, where they could feel the 

 genial influence of both hght and heat, and were bmied in the 

 hchen caves below after death. 



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

 The oceau in a new scom, are about to toach us to regard the ocean in 

 ^'sht- a new hght. Its bosom, which so teems ^ith ani- 

 mal life — its face, upon wliich 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 famihes of hving 

 creatures that out-number the sands on the sea shore for multi- 

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

 also a graveyard ; 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 

 Levelling agencies. wMch are at the bottom of the atmosphere, various 

 agents are at work, levelling both upwards and downwards. Heat 

 and cold, rain and sunshine, the winds and the streams, ail, assisted 

 by the forces of gravitation, are unceasingly wasting away the 

 high places on the land, and as perpetual£^ filhng up the low. 

 But in contemplating the levelling 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 leveUing 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 is so paralyzed there 

 that it cannot use half its power, as on dry land, in -tearing the 

 overhangkig rock from the precipice and casting it down into the 

 valley below. 



594. Hitherto we have, in imagination, been disposed to 

 The offices of ani- regard the waters of the sea as a great cushion, 

 maicuicB. placed between the air and the bottom of the ocean, 



X 2 



