t refractory
substances with its weight. It bends the rays of the sun from their
path to give us the aurora of the morning and the twilight of evening.
It disperses and refracts their various tints to beautify the approach
and the retreat of the orb of day. But for the atmosphere, sunshine
would burst on us in a moment and fail us in the twinkling of an eye,
removing us in an instant from midnight darkness to the blaze of noon."

We have written a good deal on this subject, yet the thousandth part has
not been told of even the grand and more obvious operations of the
atmosphere, much less the actions and results of its minor and invisible
processes. Were we to descend with philosophers into the minuter
laboratories of the world, and consider the permeating, ramifying,
subtle part the atmosphere plays in the innumerable transformations that
are perpetually going on around and within us, we should be constrained
to feel more deeply than we have ever yet felt, that the works of the
Creator are indeed wonderful beyond all expression or conception.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

WATERSPOUTS--CAUSES OF--APPEARANCE--ELECTRICITY--EXPERIMENTS--ARTIFICIAL
WATERSPOUTS--SHOWERS OF FISH--MR. ELLIS ON WATERSPOUTS IN THE SOUTH
SEAS.

We turn back now from the atmospheric to the aqueous ocean. Yet so
intimate is the connection between the two, that we shall find it
impossible to avoid occasional reference to the former.

Our present subject, _waterspouts_, obliges us to recur for a little to
the atmosphere, which we dismissed, or attempted to dismiss, in the last
chapter.

There is no doubt that waterspouts are to a great extent, if not
altogether, due to the presence of electricity in the air. When the
clouds have been raging for some time in the skies of tropical regions,
rendering the darkness bright, and the air tremulous with their dread
artillery, they seem to grow unusually thirsty; the ordinary means of
water-supply through the atmosphere do not appear to be sufficient for
the demand, or war-tax in the shape of water-spouts, that is levied on
nature. The clouds therefore descend to the sea, and, putting down
their dark tongues, lick up the water thirstily in the form of
waterspouts.

These whirling pillars of water frequently appear in groups of several
at a time. They are of various heights, sometimes ranging up to seven
hundred yards, with a thickness of fifty yards, and are very dangerous
to ships that happen to come w