No mingling voices sound-
An infant wàil alone;
A sob suppressed-again

That short deep gasp, and then-—
The parting groan.

Òh! change-oh, wòndrous change!
Burst are the prison bárs—
This moment! thère, so lów,
So àgonized and now!
Beyond the stars.

Oh! change-stupendous change!
There' lies the soulless clòd;

The sun eternal breaks

THERE is a river in the ocean. In the severest droughts it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never overflows. Its banks and its bottom are of cold water, while its current is of warm. The Gulf of Mexico is its fountain, and its mouth is in the Arctic Seas. It is the Gulf Stream. There is in the world no other such majestic flow of waters. Its current is more rapid than the Mississippi or the Amazon, and its volume more than a thousand times greater.

The currents of the ocean are among the most important of its movements. They carry on a constant interchange between the waters of the poles and those of the equator, and thus diminish the extremes of heat and cold in every

zone.

The sea has its climates as well as the land. They both change with the latitude; but one varies with the elevation above, the other with the depression below the sea level.

The climates in each are regulated by circulation; but the regulators are, on the one hand, winds; on the other, currents.

The inhabitants of the ocean are as much the creatures of climate as are those of the dry land; for the same Almighty hand which decked the lily, and cares for the sparrow, fashioned also the pearl, and feeds the great whale, and adapted each to the physical conditions by which his providence has surrounded it. Whether of the land or the sea, the inhabitants are all his creatures, subjects of his laws, and agents in his economy. The sea, therefore, we may safely infer, has its offices and duties to perform; so, may we infer, have its currents; and so, too, its inhabitants: consequently, he who undertakes to study its phenomena, must cease to regard it as a waste of waters. He must look upon it as a part of that exquisite machinery by which the harmonies of nature are preserved, and then he will begin to perceive the developments of order and the evidences of design.

From the Arctic Seas a cold current flows along the coasts of America, to replace the warm water sent through the Gulf Stream, to moderate the cold of western and northern Europe. Perhaps the best indication as to these cold currents may be derived from the fishes of the sea. The whales first pointed out the existence of the Gulf Stream, by avoiding its warm waters. Along the coasts of the United States all those delicate animals and marine productions which delight in warmer waters are wanting, thus indicating, by their absence, the cold current from the north now known to exist there.

In the genial warmth of the sea about the Bermudas on one hand, and Africa on the other, we find in great abundance those delicate shell-fish and coral formations which are altogether wanting in the same latitudes along the shores of South Carolina.

No part of the world affords a more difficult or dangerous navigation than the approaches of the northern coasts of the United States in winter. Before the warmth of the Gulf

Stream was known, a voyage at this season from Europe to New England, New York, and even to the Capes of the Delaware or Chesapeake, was many times more trying, difficult, and dangerous than it now is. In making this part of the coast, vessels are frequently met by snow storms and gales which mock the seaman's strength, and set at naught his skill In a little while his bark becomes a mass of ice; with her crew frosted and helpless, she remains obedient only to her helm, and is kept away for the Gulf Stream. After a few hours' run she reaches its edge, and almost at the next bound passes from the midst of winter into a sea at summer heat. Now the ice disappears from her apparel, and the sailor bathes his stiffened limbs in tepid waters. Feeling himself invigorated and refreshed with the genial warmth about him, he realizes out there at sea the fable of Antæus and his mother Earth. He rises up and attempts to make his port again, and is again, perhaps, as rudely met and beat back again from the north-west; but each time that he is driven off 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 rotatory 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

H

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 north-westerly 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 ultra-marine 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

One of the benign

suggestive, and strikingly beautiful. offices of the Gulf Stream is to convey heat from the Gulf of Mexico-where otherwise it would become excessiveand 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 across the stream on its way to Europe, 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