256 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



Southern Ocean would have almost relapsed into its 

 primitive loneliness and silence. It was always a 

 strenuous ocean, where only the best of ships and the 

 boldest of mariners could hope to hold their own, and 

 its passage has ever been calculated to show the stuff 

 that ships and men were made of. Steam in this, as 

 in so many other departments of seafaring, has wrought 

 a marvellous change, so much so, that what old sailors 

 know as running the Easting down, will probably soon 

 be a thing of the past. 



But, whether it relapses into its primitive deserted 

 condition or no, there is one phase of beneficent 

 activity which it will never lose, and one that has a 

 vast and incalculable effect upon many millions of the 

 human race. Its cold waters, studded with mighty 

 icebergs from the mysterious Southern region, where 

 life apparently cannot exist except in the sea, are 

 continually rushing northwards to supply the immense 

 and continual evaporation of the heated waters of the 

 tropical oceans, so that there is nothing extremely 

 fanciful in supposing that a nodule of ice from the 

 vicinity of Mount Erebus may, converted into rain, be 

 found nourishing a wheat ear in the fields of the Doab, 

 or that the rain for which the patient ryot is waiting, 

 in almost utter hopelessness, is coming to him from 

 that far-off region of which he had never heard, and 

 for which he has certainly never cared. And thus the 

 four great oceans, by reason of their wonderful system 

 of circulation, are mutually interdependent, and co- 

 operate in their great work for the benefit of mankind. 



