THE OCEAN. 



347 



marble cliffs of its archipelago of islands. Nothing can exceed in beauty the scenery of 

 the Grecian seas, whether by the Ananes rocks rising perpendicularly from the deep 

 like the coral reefs of the Pacific, or in the gulfs of Corinth, Nauplia, and JEgina, or 

 passing between Samos and the mainland of Asia, or breasting the current of the 

 Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. A remarkable feature of the Archipelago is the great 

 depth of its water a line of 1200 feet generally finding no bottom at the distance of 

 less than a mile from the shore, and one of 2400 feet failing to reach it in some parts 

 of the Gulf of Nauplia. The Mediterranean shows also an immense depth in other 

 places ; that of from 3000 to 6000 feet between Spain and Italy, while the deepest 

 part of Dover Straits is only 156 feet ; of the Baltic, 600 ; of the North Sea, south of the 

 Shetlands, 840 ; and in very few points between Europe and America does the Atlantic 

 exceed 1800. Another peculiarity of the Mediterranean is the depression of its level 

 below that of the Atlantic and the Black Seas, arising from a prodigious evaporation, 

 which is supposed to carry off three times the amount of water brought into it by the 

 rivers. Hence there is a constant current setting into it from the Atlantic through the 

 Straits of Gibraltar, and from the Black Sea through the Dardanelles. Every thing, as 

 Humboldt observes, that relates to the formation of this sea, which has had so powerful 

 an influence upon the first civilisation of mankind, is highly interesting. Ascending from 

 its shores, in his journey through Spain into the kingdom of Valencia, towards the lofty 

 plains of La Mancha and the Castiles, he hailed far inland, in the lengthened declivities, 

 indications of the ancient coast of the Peninsula. The physical aspect of the region 

 recalled the traditions of the Samothracians, and other historical testimonies, according to 

 which the bursting of the waters of the Euxine through the Dardanelles augmented the 

 basin of the Mediterranean, then a lake, and overflowed the southern part of Europe. 



The Mouth of the Bosphorus. 



The central elevated plain of Spain was a barrier to the inundation on the one hand, till 

 the Pillars of Hercules were rent asunder by the force of the flood, when the draining off 

 of the waters, through the intervening strait that was formed, brought the Mediterranean 



