THE OCEAN; 



THE ATMOSPIIERE, METEORS, AND LIFF 



PART L— THE OCEAN. 



BOOK I.-THE SEAS. 



CHAPTER I. 



GENERAL CONSIDEEATIONS. 



To tlie majority of mankind grouped in crowded populations on tlie 

 continents, extending over scarcely a quarter of tlie surface of the 

 globe, the sea is little else than a vast abyss without limits or bottom. 

 Even learned men are inclined, by an illusion of intellectual optics, 

 to give a much greater geographical importance to the phenomena 

 of continental regions, than to those of the ocean. Just as our 

 ancestors, beholding infinite space filled with stars and nebulae 

 arched over their heads, imagined this immensity to be a dome 

 restino- on the vast structure of the earth. 



Although the influence of the ocean in the general economy of 

 the globelias not been studied with the same care, relatively, as the 

 effect of the rivers which flow through the plains, or of the springs 

 which gush from the clefts of the hills, yet it is still of the first 

 importance, and on it all the phenomena of planetary life depend. 

 " Water is the chief of all ! '' exclaimed Pindar in the early days of 

 Hellenic civilization ; and since then science has revealed to us, that 

 the continents themselves are elaborated in the bosom of the seas, 

 and that without them earth, like a metallic surface, could give birth 

 to no organic life whatever. Thus, as almost all the cosmogonies of 

 primitive nations poetically declare, earth is " The daughter of ocean.'' 



