The Sea (La Mer). Jules Michelet

northern world." Marvellous co-partnership and mutual reaction! South America, from the respiration of its vast forests, condensed into clouds, fraternally nourishes the flowers and fruits of our Europe. The air which revives and inspirits us, is the tribute paid by the hundred isles of Asia, exhaled by the great vegetation of Java or Ceylon, and entrusted to the great cloud-messenger that turns with the world and sheds life and freshness upon it.

      Place yourself in imagination upon one of the many islands of the Pacific and look to the southward. Behind New Holland you will perceive that the southern ocean touches with its circular wave the two extreme points of the old and the new continents. No land in that antarctic world; not one of those little islands or of those pretended Polar lands which discoverers have marked only to behold their disappearance, and which probably have been but so many icebergs. Water, still water; water without end.

      From the same post of observation on which I have, in imagination, placed you, in contrast with the great circle of antarctic waters, look eastward, towards the arctic hemisphere, and you may discern what Ritter terms the circle of fire. To speak more precisely, it is an opened ring, formed by the volcanoes commencing at the Cordilleras, passing by the heights of Asia, to the innumerable basaltic isles of the eastern ocean. The first volcanoes, those of America, present, for a length of a thousand leagues a succession of sixty gigantic Beacons whose constant eruptions command the abrupt coast and the distant waters. The others, from New Zealand to the North of the Philippines, number eighty still burning, and a countless host that are extinct. Steering northward, from Japan to Kamschatka, fifty flaming craters dispense their ruddy lights far away to the gloomy seas of the Arctic. In the whole, there is a circle of three hundred active volcanoes around the eastern world.

      On the other front of the globe, our Atlantic Ocean presented a similar appearance, prior to the revolutions which extinguished most of the volcanoes of Europe and annihilated the continent of the Atlantis. Humboldt believes that that great ruin, only too strongly attested by tradition, was only too real. I may venture to add that the existence of that continent was in logical concordance with the general symmetry of the world, for that face of the globe was thus harmonized with the other. There rose, with the volcano of Teneriffe, which alone remains of them, and with our extinct volcanoes of Auvergne, of the Rhine, &c., those which were to destroy Atlantis. Altogether, they formed the counterpoise of the volcanoes of the Antilles, and other American craters.

      From these burning or extinct volcanoes of India and the Antilles, of the Cuban and the Javanese seas proceed two enormous streams of hot water, which are to warm the north, and which we may fitly term the aortæ of the world. They are provided, beside or beneath, with their two counter currents which, flowing from the north, bring cold water to compensate the flow of hot water and preserve the balance. To the two streams of hot water which are extremely salt, the cold currents administer a mass of fresher water which returns to the equator, the great electric furnace, where it is heated and made salt.

      These streams of hot water, narrow at first, some twenty leagues in breadth, long preserve their force and their identity, but by degrees they grow weaker as they widen ultimately to about a thousand leagues. Maury estimates that the hot water stream which flows from the Antilles in a northernly course towards us displaces and modifies a fourth part of the waters of the Atlantic. These great features in the life of the seas, noticed only recently, were, however, as visible as the continents themselves. Our great Atlantic and her sister, the Indian artery, proclaim themselves by their color. In each case it is a great blue torrent which traverses the green waters; so darkly blue is this torrent, that the Japanese call theirs the black river. Ours is very clearly seen, as it leaps boilingly from the Gulf of Mexico, between Cuba and Florida, and flows west, salt, and distinguishable between its two green walls. In vain does the Ocean press upon it, on either side, it still flows on, unbroken. By I know not what intrinsic density, or molecular attraction, these blue waters are so firmly held together, that, rather than admit the green water, they rear their centre into an arch, and they thus slope to the right and to the left, so that anything thrown into them rolls off into the ocean. Rapid and strong, this Gulf stream at first flows towards the north, along the shores of the United States; but, on reaching the great bank of Newfoundland, its right arm sweeps off to the eastward, while the left arm, as an under current, hastens to create, towards the Pole, the recently discovered open sea where all else around is fast frozen. The right arm spreading out, and proportionately weakened, at length reaches Europe, touches Ireland and England, which again divide the waters previously divided at Newfoundland. Weaker and weaker, it yet carries a little warmth to Norway, and carries American woods to that poor Iceland which, but for them, would die frozen beneath the very fires of her volcano.

      The Indian and the American streams have this in common, that, starting from the Line, from the electric centre of the globe, they carry with them immense powers of creation and agitation. On the one hand they seem the deep and teeming womb of a whole world of living creatures; on the other hand, they are the centre and the vehicle of tempests, whirlwinds, and water spouts. So much nursing gentleness and so much destroying fury; have we not here a great contradiction? No, it proves only that the fury disturbs only the exterior and not any considerable depths. The weakest creatures, shelled atomies, the microscopic medusæ, fluid creatures that a mere touch dissolves, availing themselves of the same current, sail, in all safety, though the tempest is loud and fierce right above them. Few of them reach our shores; they are met at Newfoundland by the cold stream from the Pole, which slays them by myriads. Newfoundland is the very bone-house of these frost-stricken voyagers. The lightest remain in suspension, even after death; but at length sink, like snowy showers to the depths, where they deposit those banks of shells which extend from Ireland to America.

      Murray calls the Indian and American streams of hot water, the two Milky Ways of the sea.

      So similar in color, heat, direction, and describing precisely the same curve, they yet have not the same destiny. The American, at the very outset, enters an inclement sea, the Atlantic, which, open to the North, bears down the floating army of icebergs from the Pole, and it thus early parts with much of its heat. The Indian stream, on the contrary, first circulating among the isles, reaches a closed sea well protected from the North, and thus for a long time preserves its original heat, electric and creative, and traces upon our globe an enormous train of life.

      Its centre is the apogee of terrestrial energy, in vegetable treasures, in monsters, in spices, in poisons. From the secondary currents which it gives off, and which flow towards the North, results another world, that of the Sea of Coral. There, says Maury, over a space as large as the four continents the polypes are industriously building thousands of islands, shoals, and reefs, which are gradually studding and dividing that sea; shoals which at present are the annoyance and the dread of the mariner, but which will at length rise to the surface, join together to form a continent, which, some day—who knows? may be the refuge of the human race, when flood, or fire, or earthquake, leave it no other shelter.

      John Reynaud in his fine article in the Encyclopedie, remarks that our world is not solitary. The infinitely complicated curve which it describes represents the forces, the various influences, which act upon her, and bear testimony to her connection and communication with the great luminaries of the Heavens.

      That connection and communication are especially visible with the Sun and Moon; the latter, though the servant of earth, has none the less power over her. As the flowers of the earth turn their heads sunward, so does the flower-bearing earth aspire towards him. In her most movable portion, her immense fluid mass, she raises herself and gives visible token of feeling his attraction. She rises as far as she can and swelling her bosom twice a day gives, at least, a sigh to the friendly stars.

      Does not our earth feel the attraction of yet other globes? Are her tides ruled only by the sun and moon? All the learned world say it, all seamen believe it; thence terrible errors resulting in shipwrecks. At the dangerous shallows of Saint Malo the error amounted to eighteen feet. It was in 1839 that Chazallan, who nearly lost his life through these errors, began to discover and calculate the secondary, but considerable undulations which, under various influences, modify the general tide. Stars less dominant than the sun and moon have, doubtless, their share in producing the alternate rise and fall of the waters of our globe. But under what law do they produce this effect? Chazallan tells