f the depths in the world-slimes and the darkness;
and in these deeps the falling remains of the upper realms, like gentle
primeval rains, afford a never-failing, never-ending source of food and
maintain the slow life in the bottoms. We think of the huge animals of
the sea when we think of mass, and it is true that the great whales are
the bulkiest creatures we know to have lived; yet it is the bacteria,
the desmids, the minute crustaceans, and many other diminutive forms
that everywhere populate the sea from the equator to the poles and
provide the vast background of the ocean life. In these gulfs of moving
unseen forms nitrification proceeds, and the rounds of life go on
unceasingly. The leviathan whale strains out these minute organisms from
the volumes of waters, and so full of them may be his maw that his
captors remove the accumulation with spades. The rivers bring down their
freight of mud and organic matter, and supply food for the denizens of
the sea. The last remains of all these multitudes are laid down on the
ocean floors as organic oozes; and nobody knows what part the abysmal
soil may play in the economy of the plant in some future epoch.

The rains of the land come from the sea; the clouds come ultimately from
the sea; the trade-winds flow regularly from the sea; the temperatures
of the land surface are controlled largely from the sea; the high lands
are washed into the sea as into a basin; if all the continents were
levelled into the sea still would the sea envelop the planet about two
miles deep. Impurities find their way into the sea and are there
digested into the universal beneficence. We must reckon with the sea.

It is supposed that the first life on the earth came forth where the
land and the waters join, from that eternal interplay of cosmic forces
where the solid and the fluid, the mobile and the immobile, meet and
marry.

Verily, the ancestral sea is the background of the planet. Its very
vastness makes it significant. It shows no age. Its deeps have no doubt
existed from the solidification of the earth and they will probably
remain when all works of man perish utterly.

The sea is the bosom of the earth's mysteries. Because man cannot set
foot on it, the sea remains beyond his power to modify, to handle, and
to control. No breach that man may make but will immediately fill; no
fleets of mighty ships go down but that the sea covers them in silence
and knows them not; man may not hold convers