from the contest, he comes forth from this stream, like the ancient son of Neptune, stronger and stronger, until, after many days, his freshened strength prevails, and he at last triumphs and enters his haven in safety, though in this contest he sometimes falls to rise no

more.

The ocean currents are partly the result of the immense evaporation which takes place in the tropical regions, where the sea greatly exceeds the land in extent. The enormous quantity of water there carried off by evaporation disturbs the equilibrium of the seas; but this is restored by a perpetual flow of water from the poles. When these streams of cold water leave the poles they flow directly toward the equator; but, before proceeding far, their motion is deflected by the diurnal motion of the earth. At the poles they have no rotary motion, and although they gain it more and more in their progress to the equator, which revolves at the rate of a thousand miles an hour, they arrive at the tropics before they have gained the same velocity of rotation with the intertropical ocean. On that account they are left behind, and, consequently, flow in a direction contrary to the diurnal rotation of the earth. Hence the whole surface of the ocean for thirty degrees on each side of the equator flows in a stream or current three thousand miles broad from east to west. The trade winds, which constantly blow in one direction, combine to give this great Equatorial Current a mean velocity of ten or eleven miles in twenty-four hours.

Were it not for the land, such would be the uniform and constant flow of the waters of the ocean. The presence of the land interrupts the regularity of this great western movement of the waters, sending them to the north or south, according to its conformation.

The principal branch of the Equatorial Current of the Atlantic takes a northwesterly direction from off Cape St. Roque, in South America. It rushes along the coast of Brazil, and, after passing through the Caribbean Sea, and sweeping round the Gulf of Mexico, it flows between Florida and Cuba, and enters the North Atlantic under the name of the Gulf Stream, the most beautiful of all the oceanic currents.

In the Strait of Florida the Gulf Stream is thirty-two miles wide, two thousand two hundred feet deep, and flows at the rate of four miles an hour. Its waters are of the purest ultramarine blue as far as the coasts of Carolina; and so completely are they separated from

the sea through which they flow, that a ship may be seen at times half in the one and half in the other.

As a rule, the hottest water of the Gulf Stream is at or near the surface; and as the deep-sea thermometer is sent down, it shows that these waters, though still much warmer than the water on either side at corresponding depths, gradually become less and less warm until the bottom of the current is reached. There is reason to believe that the warm waters of the Gulf Stream are nowhere permitted, in the oceanic economy, to touch the bottom of the sea. There is everywhere a cushion of cool water between them and the solid parts of the earth's crust. This arrangement is suggestive, and strikingly beautiful. One of the benign offices of the Gulf Stream is to convey heat from the Gulf of Mexico, where otherwise it would become excessive, and to dispense it in regions beyond the Atlantic, for the amelioration of the climates of the British Islands and of all Western Europe. Now, cold water is one of the best non-conductors of heat, but if the warm water of the Gulf Stream were sent across the Atlantic in contact with the solid crust of the earth, comparatively a good conductor of heat, instead of being sent across, as it is, in contact with a non-conducting cushion of cool water to fend it from the bottom, all its heat would be lost in the first part of the way, and the soft climates of both France and England would be as that of Labrador, severe in the extreme, and ice-bound.

It has been estimated that the quantity of heat discharged over the Atlantic from the waters of the Gulf Stream, in a winter's day, would be sufficient to raise the whole column of atmosphere that rests upon France and the British Islands from the freezing point to summer heat.

Every west wind that blows crosses the stream on its way to Europe, and carries with it a portion of this heat to temper there the northern winds of winter. It is the influence of this stream that makes Erin the "Emerald Isle of the Sea," and that clothes the shores of Albion in evergreen robes; while, in the same latitude, the coasts of Labrador are fast bound in fetters of ice.

As the Gulf Stream proceeds on its course, it gradually increases in width. It flows along the coast of North America to Newfoundland, where it turns to the east, one branch setting towards the British Islands, and away to the coasts of Norway and the Arctic Ocean. Another branch reaches the Azores, from which it bends round to the

south, and, after running along the African coast, it rejoins the great equatorial flow, leaving a vast space of nearly motionless water between the Azores, the Canaries, and Cape de Verd Islands. This great area is the Grassy or Sargasso Sea, covering a space many times larger than the British Islands. It is so thickly matted over with gulf weeds that the speed of vessels passing through it is often much retarded. When the companions of Columbus saw it, they thought it marked the limits of navigation, and became alarmed. To the eye, at a little distance, it seems substantial enough to walk upon. Patches of the weed are always to be seen floating along the outer edge of the Gulf Stream. Now, if bits of cork or chaff, or any floating substance, be put into a basin, and a circular motion be given to the water, all the light substances will be found crowding together near the centre of the pool where there is the least motion. Just such a basin is the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf Stream; and the Sargasso Sea is the center of the whirl. Columbus first found this weedy sea, in his voyage of discovery; there it has remained to this day, moving up and down, and changing its position like the calms of Cancer, according to the. seasons, the storms, and the winds. Exact observations as to its limits and their range, extending back for fifty years, assure us that its mean position has not been altered since that time.

THE AIR AND SEA.

WE have already said that the atmosphere forms a spherical shell, surrounding the earth to a depth which is unknown to us, by reason of its growing tenuity, as it is released from the pressure of its own superincumbent mass. Its upper surface cannot be nearer to us than fifty, and can scarcely be more remote than five hundred miles. It surrounds us on all sides, yet we see it not; it presses on us with a load of fifteen pounds on every square inch of surface of our bodies, or from seventy to one hundred tons on us in all, yet we do not so much as feel its weight. Softer than the finest down, more impalpable than the finest gossamer, it leaves the cobweb undisturbed, and scarcely stirs the lightest flower that feeds on the dew it supplies; yet it bears the fleets of nations on its wings around the world, and crushes the most refractory substances with its weight. When in motion, its force is sufficient to level with the earth the most stately forests and stable buildings, to raise the waters of the ocean into ridges like

mountains, and dash the strongest ships to pieces like toys. It warms and cools by turns the earth. and the living creatures that inhabit it. It draws up vapors from the sea and land, retains them dissolved in itself or suspended in cisterns of clouds, and throws them down again as rain or dew, when they are required. It bends the rays of the sun from their path to give us the aurora of the morning and twilight of evening; it disperses and refracts their various tints to beautify the approach and the retreat of the orb of day. But for the atmosphere, sunshine would burst on us in a moment and fail us in the twinkling of an eye, removing us in an instant from midnight darkness to the blaze of noon. We should have no twilight to soften and beautify the landscape, no clouds to shade us from the scorching heat; but the bald earth, as it revolved on its axis, would turn its tanned and weakened front to the full unmitigated rays of the lord of day.

The atmosphere affords the gas which vivifies and warms our frames ; it receives into itself that which has been polluted by use, and is thrown off as noxious. It feeds the flame of life exactly as it does that of the fire. It is in both cases consumed, in both cases it affords the food of consumption, and in both cases it becomes combined with charcoal, which requires it for combustion, and which removes it when combustion is over. It is the girdling, encircling air that makes the whole world kin. The carbonic acid with which body our breathing fills the air, to-morrow seeks its way round the world. The datetrees that grow round the falls of the Nile will drink it in by their leaves; the cedars of Lebanon will take of it to add to their stature; the cocoa-nuts of Tahiti will grow rapidly upon it; and the palms and bananas of Japan will change it into flowers. The oxygen we are breathing was distilled for us some short time ago by the magnolias of the Susquehanna, and the great trees that skirt the Orinoco and the Amazon; the giant rhododendrons of the Himalayas contributed to it, and the roses and myrtles of Cashmere, the cinnamon-tree of Ceylon, and the forest, older than the flood, that lies buried deep in the heart of Africa, far behind the Mountains of the Moon, gave it out. The rain we see descending was thawed for us out of the icebergs which have watched the Polar Star for ages, or it came from snows that rested on the summits of the Alps, but which the lotus lilies have soaked up from the Nile, and exhaled as vapor again into the everpresent air.

There are processes no less interesting going on in other parts of this magnificent field of research. Water is Nature's carrier: with its currents it conveys heat away from the torrid zone and ice from the frigid; or, bottling the caloric away in the vesicles of its vapor, it first makes it impalpable, and then conveys it, by unknown paths, to the most distant parts of the earth. The materials of which the coral builds the island and the sea-conch its shell are gathered by this restless leveler from mountains, rocks, and valleys in all latitudes. Some it washes down from the Mountains of the Moon, or out of the gold-fields of Australia, or from the mines of Potosi, others from the battle-fields of Europe, or from the marble-quarries of ancient Greece and Rome. These materials, thus collected and carried over falls or down rapids, are transported from river to sea, and delivered by the obedient waters to each insect and to every plant in the ocean at the right time and temperature, in proper form and in due quantity.

Treating the rocks less gently, it grinds them into dust, or pounds them into sand, or rolls and rubs them until they are fashioned into pebbles, rubble, or bowlders; the sand and shingle on the sea-shore are monuments of the abrading, triturating power of water. By water the soil has been brought down from the hills, and spread out into valleys, plains, and fields for man's use. Saving the rocks on which the everlasting hills are established, every thing on the surface of our planet seems to have been removed from its original foundation and lodged in its present place by water. Protean in shape, benignant in office, water, whether fresh or salt, solid, fluid, or gaseous, is marvelous in its powers.

It is one of the chief agents in the manifold workshops in which and by which the earth has been made a habitation fit for man.