OCEANUS 



THE ancients used the word Oceanus, the Ocean River, for 

 a mysterious and dangerous sea which bordered the world 

 as they knew it. The Atlantic Ocean, lying beyond the Pillars 

 of Hercules, was a great unknown of swift malevolent currents 

 and strange monsters compact with dread. Since those days 

 the mysteries of flowing drift and tide, the river of life which 

 began a billion years or more ago, and the complex interweav- 

 ing of the lives of plants and animals in the ocean today, have 

 all yielded in some measure to the inquiring mind of man. 

 And this, a river of many meanings, is what we write about. 



There is a great artery of warm and foreign water which 

 sweeps up the North American coast and across the wide 

 Atlantic, called the Gulf Stream. It is part of a greater system 

 of interlocking currents and drifts that girdle the North At- 

 lantic, a salt stream of life within the salt ocean that helps 

 regulate and sustain the life on land and sea of the Atlantic 

 peoples. This, the Ocean River, sweeps westerly from the 

 Canaries into the Caribbean, thence north along our coasts 

 and easterly to fan out toward Iceland, England, and Nor- 

 way in the north, and south to the coasts of Portugal and 

 Spain. There are also hidden branches of the River, cold 

 waters sinking in the northern seas, the slow, deep drift to the 

 south, and the lesser streams, the smaller vessels and capil- 



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