THE GREAT ATMOSPHERIC OCEAN. 3 



Great Britain owes her pre-eminence among nations to 

 her supremacy upon the seas. This we say in no 

 captious spirit, or with the least desire to stir up the 

 jealousies of foreigners: many of whom, from their 

 continental position, rely upon their army, and not 

 upon their navy, as we do, as their first line of defence. 



With Great Britain it must ever be otherwise: her 

 principal reliance must of necessity always be placed 

 upon her navy ; her army merely forms her second line 

 of defence at home: but also of course constitutes 

 the guarantee of order in India and in the internal parts 

 of her Colonial Empire and the guardian of her foreign 

 interests by land. 



We shall perhaps be pardoned if at the very outset 

 of this chapter we attempt to face the great question 

 of the source from whence the waters of the ocean 

 proceed, and again venture to invite attention to a 

 fact which, it may be, few of us actually realize ; namely 

 that in addition to the visible ocean whose waters 

 encircle our coasts, there is also another, far greater 

 and mightier ocean in which the earth itself is floating, 

 in the realms of infinite space. We refer to the invi- 

 sible atmospheric ocean, upon whose floor man himself, 

 like some species of deep-sea fauna as it were, lives 

 and moves and has his being. 



While at an as yet undetermined altitude above his 

 head, the stupendous billows of this great aerial ocean 

 are ceaselessly rolling like those of the terrestrial sea, 

 bearing at the same time within their currents vast 

 masses of water in the form of invisible vapour ; which, 

 so far as we know, replenish and maintain the actual 

 existence of our Great Terrestrial Reservoir the Sea. * 



* According to the Encyclopedia Britannica something like -j\ of 



