6 THE OCEAN. 



of the ocean, and, so to speak, investigate its inequalities with those 

 enormous " feelers," their sounding apparatus ? 



"We may well imagine that the submarine surface still preserves all 

 its primitive rudeness ; and that its rocks, cliffs, and fells uniformly 

 present edges unworn and sharp, the marks of fracture, just as on the 

 day when the solid rock was first cleft. And, in fact, in the depths of 

 the sea there are no frosts to break off projecting peaks, no lightnings 

 to split, no glaciers to carry them or crumble them away, no meteoric 

 influences to corrode and round them. Nevertheless, if there are not in 

 the sea, as on the land, agencies like these, ceaselessly at work level- 

 ing projections, there are others which as ceaselessly labour to smooth 

 the asperities of the surface. There are the sedimentary deposits 

 brought down by the rivers ; and innumerable millions of the skele- 

 tons of animalculae, which live in the deep, or fall like snow from the 

 upper strata of the water and gradually fill up the submarine valleys. 

 Those fantastic mountain-chains drawn on the bed of the sea by Buache 

 and other geographers, cannot therefore really exist, since the geolo- 

 gical agencies at work under water differ from those which carve out 

 the table-lands and mountains on our continents. If some immense 

 eddy prevented the particles from being deposited in the deep parts 

 of the ocean, then the rocks and the rifts of the abysses would keep 

 their first form, like those peaks and craters of the moon which are 

 not worn away by the inclemencies of an atmosphere. There are, 

 indeed, tracts in the sea where, perhaps from the influence of a sub- 

 marine counter-current, the rocks of the bottom are not covered by 

 organic alluvium. In the deepest part of that great arm of the sea 

 which separates the Faeroe Islands from Great Britain, Wallich 

 drew up from a depth of more than 600 fathoms * a large fragment 

 of quartz detached from the living rock, and several pieces of basalt ; 

 it is quite possible, however, that these fragments had been dropped 

 there by an iceberg. 



In general, the sea-bed extends for wide spaces in long undula- 

 tions and gentle slopes. Sailors, who are carried swiftly over the 

 water by wind or steam, and who generally take soundings at places 

 far distant from one another, are tempted to exaggerate the magnitude 

 of inequalities in the sea-bed, and to see chasms and precipices, where 

 the declivity is in reality inconsiderable. Escarpments, similar to 

 those of the continental mountains, very rarely present themselves ; 

 Fitzroy was greatly surprised to find in the neighbourhood of the 



* Marine soundings are always taken in fathoms ; a fathom is equivalent to 2 yards or 6 

 feet linear. 



