SWIRLS OF THE SEA 



39 



What wide rivers of the sea run in the great 

 Antarctic has not been revealed ; and yet, so far 

 as discovery has gone, the whole surface of the 

 waters seems in motion with dark blue or gray- 

 green currents, going hither and thither, back- 

 ward and forward, seeking a resting place and 

 never finding it. The direction, force, and 

 speed of the currents are constant in only a 

 very general way. Time was when they were 

 considered as unvarying in their movements 

 as the flow of the Amazon or the Rhine; but it 

 is now known that they are subject to many 

 vicissitudes, dependent upon propelling forces 

 that are continually changing. 



These rivers of the sea early gave rise to 

 strange stories about their origins, their violent 

 entrances and exits, and the supernatural pow- 

 ers behind them. Even so late as the middle of 

 the seventeenth century Kircher suggested that 

 they were caused by a circulation of the waters 

 through a great tunnel in the axis of the earth. 

 He thought that the northern drift of the Gulf 

 Stream was the inward draft of the Norwegian 

 maelstrom, that the sea waters went whirling 

 down the great eddy, passed through the earth, 

 and were spouted out again in the whirlpool of 

 the Gulf of Bothnia. This same Gulf Stream 

 drift was believed by geographers in the eigh- 



Variationa 

 of currents. 



Early be- 

 liefs about 

 ocean cur- 

 rents. 



