Excerpt from The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life: Being the Second Series of a Descriptive History of the Life of the Globe

To the majority Of mankind grouped in crowded populations on the continents, extending over scarcely a quarter of the surface of the globe, the sea is little else than a vast abyss Without limits or bottom. Even learned men are inclined, by an illusion of intellectual optics, to give a much greater geographical importance to the phenomena of continental regions, than to those of the ocean. Just as our ancestors, beholding infinite space filled with stars and nebulae arched over their heads, imagined this immensity to be a dome resting on the vast structure of the earth.

Although the influence of the ocean in the general economy of the globe has not been studied with the same care, relatively, as the effect of the rivers Which flow through the plains, or of the springs Which gush from the clefts of the hills, yet it is still of the first importance, and on it all the phenomena of planetary life depend. 3' Water is the chief of all! Exclaimed Pindar in the early days of Hellenic civilization; and since then science has revealed to us, that the continents themselves are elaborated in the bosom of the seas, and that Without them earth, like a metallic surface, could give birth to no organic life Whatever. Thus, as almost all the cosmogonies of primitive nations poetically declare earth is The daughter of ocean.

This is not simply a myth, it is a fact. The study of the the earth - rocks, sand, clay, chalk, conglomerates, proves materials of the continental masses have in great part been at the bottom of the sea and have assumed their form and there. Many rocks, especially the were formerly believed to have em interior of the earth, are perhaps in slowly t incessantly in the great laboratory and summits of the highest mount above the level of the ocean, may sometimes action of the sea in ancient times. Under our very ey work of creation, commenced by the seas in the is carried on without relaxation; with such energy, in during this short life, man may witness important their shores. If the waves undermine and slowly d sula here, elsewhere they spread out sandy beaches New rocks, differing in arrangement and appears ancient rocks demolished by the waves. Thus the granite are disintegrated by the action of the waters, which carry away its various constituents, quartz, felspar, and mica, building them up into new rocks. In the same way the clay resulting from the slow decomposition of the porphyritic or granitic felspar is transformed into slate, which becomes sooner or later as hard as the ancient schists. But the dashing waves and the flowing rivers are not the only agents occupied in the formation of new rocks in the bosom of the sea. There is another ever active agent engaged beneath its waters. This agent is animal life. Shells, corals, and innumerable animalculze with calcareous or silicious coverings, in habiting the ocean, are incessantly engaged in consuming and re producing. They absorb and digest matter which the rivers bring down to the sea, and secrete substances which form their skeletons and cases: as, generation after generation, these swarms perish, their remains are Spread out over the bottom of the sea or heaped up on the strand; and at last form immense banks and submarine plateaux which by some subsequent elevation will be brought to light.

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