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CHAPTER IV. 



THE MAJESTY OF THE OCEAN. 



The Immensity of the Ocean Ebb and Flood Causes of the Tides Their In- 

 fluence on the Organic Life of the Seas Ocean Currents How Produced 

 Their Importance Evidences of Unity of Design resulting from the intimate 

 Connection of the Phenomena of the Seas and the distant Celestial Bodies. 



WHERE are the boundaries of the sea? where is its beginning or 

 its end ? It rolls through every zone, and the continents are 

 but islands rising from its immeasurable bosom. . Day and 

 night, winter and summer, rule at one and the same time 

 over its vast domains ; the sun is ever rising and ever setting 

 over its restless waters. Here palm-groves wave their graceful 

 fronds over its ever-smiling margin ; there eternal ice blocks 

 up its melancholy strands; here the storm rages over the 

 mountain-wave ; there profound peace reigns over its surface, 

 and not a breath of air ruffles its glassy brow. 



Sublime in space, the sea is no less sublime in time. The 

 present dry land bears everywhere the traces that it once rested 

 in the bosom of the waters, and how many continents and islands 

 may they not have swallowed in the course of unnumbered cen- 

 turies, how often may they not have changed their seat and dis- 

 placed their boundaries ? Countless forms of animal life have 

 one after the other appeared and perished beneath them ; they 

 have successively witnessed the birth and the death of the tri- 

 lobites, of the ammonites, of the encrinites, and of the giant 

 saurians. And how long may not the desert-ocean have rolled 

 its waves before organic life first dawned upon it, before the first 

 alga spread its fronds along the shore, or the first mollusk opened 

 its valves to the tide ? 



What a majestic age ! what a past and what a future ! for the 

 ocean, the sepulchre of so many extinct forms of animals and 

 plants, is destined to be the grave of many others yet glowing 



