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CAPE COD. 
had to think so; the old man replied, that on sonnding, 
he saw the lead in the water at a distance of many 
fathoms more than he had seen it before; that therefore 
the water was become clear all of a sudden, which he 
looked upon as a certain sign of an impending hurricane 
in the sea.” The sequel of the story is, that by good 
fortune, and by dint of rowing, they managed to gain a 
safe harbor before the hurricane had reached its height; 
but it finally raged with so much violence, that not only 
many ships were lost and houses unroofed, but even their 
own vessel in harbor was washed so far on shore that 
several weeks elapsed before it could be got off. 
The Greeks would not have called the ocean dTpvyeros, 
or unfruitful, though it does not produce wheat, if they 
had viewed it by the light of modern science, for natu¬ 
ralists now assert that “ the sea, and not the land, is the 
principal seat of life,” — though not of vegetable life. 
Darwin affirms that our most thickly inhabited forests 
appear almost as deserts when we come to compare them 
with the corresponding regions of the ocean.” Agassiz 
and Gould tell us that “ the sea teems with animals of 
all classes, far beyond the extreme point of flowering 
plants”; but they add, that “experiments of dredging 
in very deep water have also taught us that the abyss of 
the ocean is nearly a desert”; — “so that modern in¬ 
vestigations,” to quote the words of Desor, “ merely go 
to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated 
by the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is 
the origin of all things.” Yet marine animals and plants 
hold a lower rank in the scale of being than land animals 
and plants. “ There is no instance known,” says Desor, 
“ of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after 
having lived in its lower stage on dry land,” but as in 
