cool the water perceptibly for thirty or forty miles around them, and the air much further. Ross met with multitudes in the South Polar seas with perpendicular sides, from one hundred to one hundred and eighty feet high, and some were several miles in circumference. The seasons are not supposed to influence the ocean to a greater depth than three hundred feet. In a course of experiments it was found that a sounding lead lowered to the depth of six hundred feet was so hot when raised that it could not be handled; this was probably owing to a submarine volcano or hot spring. The tide at Bristol sometimes rises fifty feet, and even reaches one hundred and twenty feet in the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia, whilst there is scarcely any tide in the islands of the Pacific; up the Amazon it is perceptible for five hundred and seventy-six miles. The famous Maelstrom, on the coast of Norway, is a mile and a half in diameter, and the roar of this whirlpool is so loud that it can be heard miles off. In the rocks of Cephalonia there is a cavity into which the Mediterranean has been flowing for ages. The lakes of America contain more than one-half of the fresh water on the earth. The river Niagara unites two of these lakes, and forms the celebrated falls the most sublime known. Lake Ontario and Lake Erie appear to be increasing in size; and in one of the bays of Lake Huron thunder is continually heard. A large lake of fresh water was formed in one night in Japan simultaneously with the uprising of a volcano from the earth. At the eastern end of Java there is a lake whose waters contain sulphuric acid, from which a river flows wherein no living creature is found, nor can fish live in the sea near its mouth. } A fall of one foot in 200 renders a river unnavigable. The Rhone, which flows very rapidly, falls one foot in 2,620, and has a velocity of 120 feet per minute. The Amazon, with its enormous mass of waters meeting the opposing tidal current from the ocean at a short distance from land, raises a terrific wave at spring tides, which carries devastation before it, shaking the very islands, it is asserted, in its passage. The Rio de la Plata is never less than one hundred and seventy miles across for two hundred miles from its mouth, and its muddy water discolours the Atlantic for two hundred miles. The swift and turbid Mississippi sweeps away whole forests when flooded, and the trees, heaped together in thick masses, are carried down and deposited at its mouth, and in the Mexican Gulf, over hundreds of square miles. These rafts are from six to ten feet thick, and often several miles in length. A stream which joins the Magdalena forms the cataract of Zequendama, where the river, rushing through a chasm, descends five hundred and thirty feet at two bounds into a dark pool, illumined only at noon by a few feeble rays, and sending up a cloud of vapour visible fifteen miles off. The rivers of equatorial America vary in colour; both white and black waters are found there. In boring artesian wells, which are often of great depth, the water frequently spouts up to the height of forty and fifty feet. There is a hot spring in South America which has a temperature of 206° 6'. Next in order comes the earth-" the round world," which "cannot be moved." This immense globe, nearly twenty-five thousand miles in circumference, sweeps along in its orbit at the rate of more than eleven hundred miles in a minute, revolving in the same space of time upon its axis with a velocity which turns its equatorial inhabitants through more than seventeen miles. The intensity of gravitation varies from local causes as well as from the form of the earth; it is feeble at Bordeaux, and increases to Clermont, Ferraud, Milan, and Padua, this increase being probably caused by dense masses underground. The earth is more than five times as heavy as a globe of water of the same size, and more than twice the weight of a similar globe of granite. There is a stratum of variable depth beneath the surface at which the temperature is always the same. The small portion of the earth through which man has penetrated-a mere atom of the distance to the centre--is arranged in layers called strata, in some of which the remains of animals and vegetables are found, converted often into stony matter. Amongst these productions of bygone ages were tree ferns fifty feet in height; gigantic plants of the fox-tail tribe; shells shaped like a coiled-up snake and as large as a cart wheel; lizards, some with long swan-like necks, others with enormous eyes, and others with wings. There were also immense lizards, seventy feet in length and fourteen and a half feet in circumference, and huge mammals eighteen feet long with two tusks bent downwards, with which each is supposed to have raked up aquatic plants and to have anchored itself to the bank of the river or lake on whose waters it thus slept floating. Fossil remains are so numerous that with the exception of the metals and some of the primary rocks, every particle of matter on the surface of the globe has probably once formed a part of some living creature. Mountains are formed of minute shells; the tusks of fossil elephants have formed an article of trade for centuries, and whole islands in the Arctic regions are chiefly composed of the remains of such elephants. Coal-a collection of fossilized vegetable matter-occupies enormous spaces; the Appalachian coal-field in North America has an area of sixty-three thousand square miles, and that of Illinois, in the same country, is nearly as large as England. Could a person be raised above a point near Falmouth, until a whole hemisphere became visible, he would see the greatest quantity of land which can be beheld from any one place; and if raised above New Zealand, he would see the greatest quantity of water, so that England is nearly in the centre of the greatest mass of land. Nearly threefourths of the surface of the globe is occupied by water. Glaciers, a mixture of snow, ice, and water, move in the Alps at a rate of from twelve to twenty-five feet annually; but some there have not altered in shape or position from time immemorial, whilst others cover ground formerly cultivated. It is calculated that there are four hundred in the Alps alone, varying from three to fifteen miles in length and from one to two and a quarter miles in width; some of these have a thickness of six hundred feet. One pass across the Himalaya Mountains is twenty thousand feet above the sea, or more than fou. thousand feet higher than Mont Blanc The journey over the lofty passes in this range of mountains is terrific; many animals die from the rarity of the air; birds perish by thousands from the wind, and violent storms add to the horrors of the passage. In the dreary regions of North-Eastern Siberia, the people, and even the snow, both give forth a steam, and this vapour is instantly changed into millions of needles of ice, which make a noise in the air like torn satin. The raven in its flight leaves a long line of vapour behind, and the trunks of the thickest trees rend with a loud report. In the southern parts of these regions the glowing heat of summer produces a change like magic; the snow is scarcely gone when flowers of various hues blossom, seed, and die in a few months. In the province of Cutch, in Hindostan, seven thousand square miles are alternately a sandy desert and an inland sea, for in April the wind drives the waters of the ocean over this tract of land, leaving bare a few grassy elevations on which wild asses feed. In the Andes there are cities, villages, and mines, at greater heights than the summit of what we consider lofty mountains: the highest city in the world is Potosì. Immense plains are found in different parts of the earth, often nearly as level as the sea; there is frequently no eminence one foot high in two hundred and seventy square miles in the South American plains, some of which are covered with impenetrable thistles ten feet high others with grass mingled with brilliant flowers, where thousands of horses and cattle feed others by swamps and bogs which are annually flooded for thousands of square miles, when multitudes of animals perish, so that in some places they give the ground the odour of musk; others by thorny bushes and dwarf trees; others by dense impassable forests, in which myriads of animals live, filling the night air with one loud inharmonious roar, not continuously, but in bursts. Millions of animals occasionally perish on some of these plains, when their arid vegetation gets on fire from any cause. In North America, there is a tract of saline ground which is often covered to the depth of two or three inches with salt. In Canada, the trees with their branches are sometimes covered with ice an inch in thickness, whilst icicles hang from the boughs. The least wind brings them crashing down, and, should a breeze spring up, the 10rest at length gives way, tree after tree falls, carrying all before it, till the whole place resounds with terrific discharges like those of artillery. -Home Friend, S.P.C.K. COMPOSED IN THE VALLEY NEAR DOVER ON THE DAY OF LANDING. HERE, on our native soil, we breathe once more! Europe is yet in bonds: but let that pass- With such a dear Companion at my side. Wordsworth. |