THE OCEAN AND ITS LIFE. 95 



lands and its valleys, sometimes barren, and sometimes 

 covered with luxuriant vegetation. Beneath its placid, even 

 surface, there are ^inequalities far greater than the most 

 startling heights on the continents of the earth. In the 

 Atlantic, south of St. Helena, the lead of the French frigate 

 Venus, reached bottom only at a depth of 14,556 feet, 

 or a distance equal to the height of Mount Blanc ; and 

 Captain Ross, during his last expedition to the South Pole, 

 found no bottom yet at 27,600 feet, a depth equal to 

 more than five miles, so that there the Dawalaghiri might 

 have been placed on top of Mount Sinai, without appear- 

 ing above the waters ! And yet, from the same depth, 

 mountains rise in cliffs and reefs, or expand upwards in 

 broad, fertile islands. 



Nor can we any longer sustain the ancient faith in the 

 stability of the " terra jirma" as contrasted with the ever- 

 changing nature of the sea. Recent discoveries have 

 proved, on the contrary, that the land changes, and the 

 waters are stable ! The ocean maintains always the same 

 level ; but, as on the great continents, table-lands rise and 

 prairies sink, so does the bottom of the sea rise and fall. 

 In the South Sea this takes place alternately, at stated 

 times. To such sinking portions of our earth belongs, 

 among others, New Holland. So far from being a new, 

 young land, it is, on the contrary, with its strange flora, 

 so unlike that of the rest of the world, and its odd and 

 marvellous animals, an aged, dying island, which the ocean 

 is slowly burying, inch by inch. 



And a wondrous world, is the world of the great sea. 

 There are deep abysses, filled with huge rocks, spectral 



