Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/193

Rh 'waves of the sea would lift up their voice' and the very stones of the earth cry out against me.

"As a student of physical geography, I regard earth, sea, air, and water as parts of a machine, pieces of mechanism, not made with hands, but to which, nevertheless, certain offices have been assigned in the terrestrial economy; and when, after patient research, I am led to the discovery of one of these offices, I feel, with the astronomer of old, 'as though I had thought one of God's thoughts,' and tremble. Thus, as we progress with our science, we are permitted now and then to point out here and there in the physical machinery of the earth a design of the Great Architect when He planned it all.

"Take the little Nautili. Where do the fragile creatures go? What directing hand guides them from sea to sea? What breeze fills the violet sails of their tiny craft? And by whose skill is it enabled to brave the sea, and defy the fury of the gale? What mysterious compass directs the flotilla of the graceful Argonauts? Coming down from the Indian Ocean, and arriving off the stormy Cape, they separate, the one part steering for the Pacific, the other standing for the Atlantic Ocean. Soon the ephemeral life that animates these little navigators will be extinct; but the same power that cared for them in life, now guides them after death; for though dead, their task in the physical economy of our planet is not yet finished, nor have they ceased to afford instruction in philosophy.

"The frail shell is now to be drawn to distant seas by the lower currents. like the leaf carried through the air by the wind, the lifeless remains descend from depth to depth by an insensible fall, even to the appointed burial-place on the bottom of the deep, there to be collected into heaps and gathered into beds, which at some day are to appear above the surface, a storehouse rich with fertilizing Rh