TIDE-EIPS AND SEA DRIFT. 383 



current from Baffin's Bay upon the Gulf Stream is strikingly- 

 beautiful . 



743. Another feature of the sea expressed by this plate is a 

 The great bend ia sort of reflection or rccast of the shore-line in the 

 the Gulf Stream. temperature of the water. This feature is most 

 striking in the North Pacific and Indian Oceans. The remarkable 

 intrusion of the cool into the volume of warm waters to the 

 southward of the Aleutian Islands is not unlike that (§ 731) 

 which the cool waters from Davis' Straits make in the Atlantic 

 upon the Gulf Stream. In sailing through this " horse-shoe," or 

 bend in the Gulf Stream (§ 731), Captain N. B. Grant, of the 

 American ship " Lady Arbella," bound from Hamburgh to New 

 York, in May, 1854, passed, from daylight to noon, twenty-four 

 large " bergs," besides several small ones, " the whole ocean, as 

 far as the eye could reach, being literally covered with them. I 

 should," he continued, "judge the average height of them above 

 the surface of the sea to be about sixty feet ; some five or six of 

 them were at least twice that height, and, with their frozen peaks 

 jutting up in the most fantastic shapes, presented a truly sublime 

 spectacle." 



744. The *' horse-shoe " of cold in the warm water of the 

 The horse-shoe in North Pacific, though extending 5 degrees farther 

 the Japan current, towards the south, canuot be the harbour for such 

 icebergs. The cradle of those of the Atlantic was perhaps in the 

 Frozen Ocean, for they may have come thence through Bafiin's 

 Bay. But in the Pacific there is no nursery for them. The 

 water in Behring's Strait is too shallow to let them pass from 

 that ocean into the Pacific, and the climates of Russian America 

 do not favour the formation of large bergs. But, though we do 

 not find in the North Pacific the physical conditions which 

 generate icebergs like those of the Atlantic, we find them as 

 abundant with fogs. The line of separation between the warm 

 and cold water assures us of these conditions. 



745. What beautiful, grand, and benign ideas do we not see 

 The animalcule of oxprcssed in that immeuso body of warm waters 

 the sea. which are gathered together in the middle of the 

 Pacific and Indian Oceans ! It is the womb of the sea. In it 

 coral islands innumerable have been fashioned, and pearls formed 

 in " great heaps ;" there multitudes of living things, countless in 

 numbers and infinite in variety, are hourly conceived. With 

 space enough to hold the four continents and to spare, the tepid 



