92 SEASIDE DIVINITY. 



unsuccessfully to find the bottom of the ocean with 

 a line 34,000 feet long, and Lieut. Berryman re- 

 ported another unsuccessful effort of the same 

 kind on a sounding line measuring 39,000 feet. 

 In the North Atlantic Ocean the greatest depth to 

 which the sounding line has reached appears to 

 be 25,000 feet. That the greatest depths of the 

 ocean far exceed those measurements there is much 

 reason to suppose, and although Laplace estimated 

 the greatest depth at eleven, and Dr. Whewell at 

 nine, it is probably as much as fourteen or fifteen 

 miles. Whether animal or vegetable life exists 

 at those enormous depths, and under the immense 

 pressure of so great a mass of water, and in the 

 profound darkness which there prevail, it is difficult 

 to say. But as in subterranean waters, under vast 

 pressure, and when no light has access, some species 

 of fishes have been found destitute of eyes, which 

 could be of no use to them, and probably so 

 organised as to sustain the pressure to which they 

 are exposed, living beings may also exist in those 

 unfathomable depths to which the sounding line 

 has never reached. 



The colour of the sea is another subject which 

 naturally attracts the attention of the visitor to 

 its shores. That the general hue of its surface 

 varies greatly, as seen from the beach, is well 

 known to every observer. At one time the watery- 

 expanse assumes a grey or leaden colour, at an- 

 other its colour is a light or a dark blue. All these 

 shades of the surface with their modifications are 

 produced by reflection. The surface of the deep 



