248 
THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. 
ume of warm waters to the southward of the Aleutian Islands, is 
not unlike that which the cool waters from Davis's Straits make 
in the Atlantic upon the Gulf Stream. As I write, I receive from 
Captain N. B. Grant the abstract log of the American ship Lady 
Arbella, bound from Hamburg to New York, in May, 1854. In 
saihng through this "horse-shoe," or bend in the Gulf Stream 
(§• 522), he passed, from daylight to noon, twenty-four large 
"bergs," besides several small ones, "the whole ocean, as far 
as the eye could reach, being literally covered with them." " I 
should," he continues, "judge the average height of them above 
the surface of the sea to be about sixty feet ; some five or six of 
them were at least twice that height, and, with their frozen peaks 
jutting up in the most fantastic shapes, presented a truly sublime 
spectacle." 
540. This " horse-shoe" of cold in the warm water of the North 
Pacific, though extending 5 degrees farther toward the south, can 
not be the harbor for such icebergs. The cradle of those of the 
Atlantic was perhaps in the Frozen Ocean, for they may have 
come thence through Baffin's Bay. But in the Pacific there is no 
nursery for them. The water in Behring's Strait is too shallow 
to let them pass from that ocean into the Pacific, and the climates 
of Russian America do not favor the formation of large bergs. 
But, though we do not find in the North Pacific the physical con- 
ditions which generate icebergs like those of the Atlantic, we find 
them as abundant with fogs. The line of separation between the 
warm and cold water assures us of these conditions. 
541. What beautiful, grand, and benign ideas do we not see ex- 
pressed in that immense body of warm waters which are gathered 
together in the middle of the Pacific and Indian Oceans ! It is 
the womb of the sea. In it, coral islands innumerable have been 
fashioned, and, pearls formed in " great heaps ;" there, multitudes 
of living things, countless in numbers and infinite in variety, are 
hourly conceived. With space enough to hold the four conti- 
nents and to spare, its tepid waters teem with nascent organ- 
isms.* They sometimes swarm so thickly there that they change 
* " It is the realm of reef-building corals, and of the wondrously-beautiful assem- 
blage of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, that live among them or prey upon them. 
The brightest and most definite arrangements of color are here displayed. It is the 
seat, of maximum development of the majority of marine genera. It has bu,t few rc- 
