12G THE OCEAN. 



Euripus regularly follow the five hours of prayer ;* finally, the rapid 

 observations of several travellers describe in still another manner the 

 oscillations of the sea in the narrow channel. The fact is, that the 

 currents of the Strait of Negropont are unexplained, and if they 

 succeed one another in as strange a manner as the inhabitants of 

 those shores affirm, one would really comprehend the legend, accord- 

 ing to which Aristotle, after having vainly sought to divine the 

 mystery, plunged in despair into the whirlpools of the Euripus. 



Still more famous than the currents of the Strait of Euboea were 

 the abysses of Scylla and Charybdis, braved for the first time by the 

 wise Ulysses. According to the Homeric chants, the two howling 

 monsters which guarded the entrance to the Straits of Messina, drew 

 into their submarine caverns immense whirlpools of water, which 

 they afterwards discharged in furious currents, and all the ships 

 which aj^proached those formidable caverns were inevitably en- 

 gulfed. At present there are no straits in the Mediterranean more 

 frequented than those of Messina, and owing to the soundings 

 effected in these pretended abysses where the ancients saw the navel 

 of the sea, the monsters have lost their terrible prestige. It is now 

 known that the whirlpools of Charybdis and Scylla are nothing else 



Fig. 47.— Profile of the Straits of Messina. 



than lateral movements produced by the ebb and flow, in their 

 passage through a too narrow channel, whose width is hardly 

 2 miles, and which the conquerors of Sicily have more than 

 once crossed by swimming on their horses. At the time of the 

 rising tide the current tends to the north from the Ionian to the 

 Tyrrhenian sea ; at the fall of the tide, the stream coming from the 

 north assumes the preponderance, and drives the contrary current 

 towards the south. f But there is a strife between the two liquid 



* Natur, t. viii., 1864. 

 t Spallanzani ; von Hoff j Smyth. 



