CHAPTER I.

BIRTH OF THE OCEAN.

HE Ocean is the eldest brother of the continents, the loving

father of the first creatures endowed with life, which

appeared on the surface of our planet, and which were engendered by myriads in its vast loins.

"And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," we are told in the Book of Genesis.

"And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind."

But the Ocean itself, how did it spring into being? Let us endeavour, in imagination, to be present at this sublime and magnificent act of creation.

It is a fact, no longer disputed, that the Earth, at its origin, was an immense mass of vapours and incandescent gases, forming what astronomers call a "nebula," or "nebulous matter." The greatest

* Genesis i. 2, 21.

philosophers of modern times, Descartes, Buffon, Leibnitz, Laplace, and among English geologists, Buckland and Lyell, have admitted the truth of this hypothesis, which recent geological discoveries have invested with all the characters of a rigorously demonstrated physical theorem The most eminent authorities only differ upon comparatively trivial points, upon accessary circumstances, the majority of which are still clouded in obscurity, and which must long continue to exercise the imagination and the reason, before man will arrive, I do not say at any degree of certainty, but at probabilities sufficiently strong to take the place of certainties.

Descartes was the first who put forth the idea of the incandescence of our planet, which he defined in these words: "La terre est un soleil encroûté" (Earth is an encrusted sun). Leibnitz was also of opinion that the earth and its sister spheres were originally selfluminous bodies, which, after having burned for a considerable period, flickered out as they grew cold, and became hard and obscure. This is the reason, according to him, that the solid surface of the globe is in a great measure composed of vitrified matter. "Facile intelligas,” he says, "vitrum esse velut terræ basin"-You will easily understand that the basin of the earth is as it were glass.

After Leibnitz, and prior to Buffon, other physical philosophers— Burnet, Woodward, and Whiston-had advanced more or less ingenious speculations upon the origin of the world. Buffon, when endeavouring to explain the origin of mountains-a formation for which M. Elie de Beaumont has so felicitously accounted by his admirable "theory of elevation"-Buffon, I say, expounded successively, in his "Théorie de la Terre," and in his "Époques de la Nature," two widely different views. At first he attributed the formation of mountains to the action of the waters. It was not long before he abandoned this idea, and enunciated another which approximated more closely to that put forward, at a later period, by M. de Beaumont. In this new hypothesis he compares the effects of the consolidation of the "globe of the earth in its fused condition," to

Leibnitz, "Protogæa," p. 5 (edition of Scheidius).

BUFFON'S EPOCHS OF CREATION.

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those which would occur to a mass of melted glass or metal when it began to grow cool. He divides the history of nature, in other words that of creation, into seven epochs:

The first is that when the Earth and planets assumed their configuration;

The second, when matter, being consolidated, formed the interior rock of the globe, as well as the great vitrescible masses which lie at its surface;

The third, when the waters covered our continents;

In the fourth the waters retired, and the volcanoes began their eruptions;

In the fifth, elephants and other animals of the South inhabited the Arctic regions;

In the sixth, took place the separation of the continents; and, In the seventh, Man commenced to reign over nature.

But Buffon, a man of splendid genius, who, as if by intuition, so to speak, leapt at great truths, failed in those details which only rigorous observation and exact calculation can furnish, and without which the most brilliant system is nothing more than a fairy castle built upon sand.

Finally came Laplace, whose celebrated hypothesis is justly considered one of the most luminous conceptions which the inspiration of science ever kindled in the human mind.

*

This hypothesis gives to the sun, and to all bodies gravitating in what Descartes called its whirlpool (tourbillon) or vortex, a common origin. "In the primitive condition in which we suppose the sun to be placed," says Laplace, "it resembles those nebula which the telescope reveals to us, composed of a more or less brilliant nucleus,

*This was also the opinion of Buffon. Only the latter supposed a comet to fall upon the sun, which should have impelled into space certain splendours, certain fragments of that orb, and these fragments, solidifying and assuming a circular outline, formed the planets and their various satellites. Laplace had no difficulty in demonstrating that such an hypothesis was wholly inadmissible: first, because the comets are in themselves masses far too diffuse to be able to rend and split up the sun, and if the latter were in a nebulous state, a comet, even if it dashed against it, could only have been engulphed in the nebula;

surrounded by a nebulosity which, condensing itself on the surface of the said nucleus, transforms it into a star." This nebula was animated by a movement of rotation round its axis. As it gradually cooled and contracted, it abandoned to the successive limits of its atmosphere the condensed zones of vapour which detached themselves. The débris of these belts or rings formed new nebulæ, inspired, as it were, by a twofold movement of rotation and translation, which, being only the continuation of the anterior movement, necessarily preserved the direction of the solar rotation. These nebulæ, incessantly cooling and shrinking, gave birth, in their turn, and by the same means, to their satellites.

The primitive fluidity of the planets is a necessary consequence of such a hypothesis. This fluidity is demonstrated, moreover, by the flattening of the poles, which originates in the action of the centrifugal force, and by every fact, astronomical and geological. While, then, we do not altogether accept the hypothesis of Laplace, whose absolute value we cannot here discuss, we may take, as the startingpoint of our history of the Ocean, that moment in the dim long ago when, after millions of years, the globe which we inhabit was still an assemblage of burning vapours revolving in space.

But Earth already is. This mass, which seems a vast cloud of fire, encloses all the elements which shall hereafter assist in the formation of our planet, all the materials of the terrestrial creation. Slowly but surely the nebula grows cold. The substances which compose it,

obedient at once to the central attraction and to the laws of their physical and chemical properties, arrange themselves in concentric strata, liquefy, or preserve their gaseous condition, combine with one another or remain isolated, according to their specific densities, their

secondly, because, supposing that separation of fragments of which Buffon speaks to have occurred, these fragments revolving round the sun must have touched its surface at each revolution, and their orbits, in that case, instead of being nearly circular, would have been very excentrical. [Yet a somewhat similar, and a not less absurd theory, has been propounded in explanation of the occasional fall of aerolites and meteoric bodies. Such are the extravagances of Genius, when it wanders out of the world of facts into that of speculation. Translator.]

After a certain

degrees of cohesion, and their reciprocal affinities. period of time, the planet would have appeared to any spectator composed of two distinct portions: at the centre, a liquid nucleus; around this centre, a gaseous atmosphere still occupying, relatively, an immense extent. But as soon, and in proportion, as the caloric loses itself in space, the nucleus increases in volume through the successive condensation of the gaseous layers in contact with it; the atmosphere proportionally diminishes and contracts, until it no longer contains any other matters than such as are capable of preserving their vapourousness at a sufficiently low temperature. The centrifugal force, engendered by the rotation of the liquid nucleus, has produced the flattening of the poles, and in the intermedial region a bulging or swelling out, so much the more sensible, because the two extremities, losing a further amount of caloric by their radiation, and receiving less from the sun, are first covered with a solid skin or crust. However, this skin gradually thickens and extends itself until it finally enwraps the entire sphere.

This period has been designated, by a French geologist, the Brute Period, in which as yet no sign of life has appeared. We now enter upon the second period, wherein life first manifests itself. The first act of this new phase is the precipitation of the waters or the formation of the seas. Two gases distributed throughout nature in prodigious abundance, oxygen and hydrogen, have combined during the nebulous or incandescent period, and from their combination results another gas, in the proportion of one part of the former to two parts of the latter-this is Water. As soon as the temperature of the atmosphere, into which this vapour enters, has sunk below 100° C. (or 212° F.), the vapour begins to pass into water. The first rains fall. At the outset they are almost immediately evaporated upon coming in contact with the burning soil; but it cools all the more quickly; then they are condensed to fall again, and again, until liquid layers (so to speak) form and develop, augment in depth and increase in extent, finally spreading over a considerable area, or even the entirety, of the earth's surface. Thus is born the Ocean.