Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/424

398 in the middle. In the North Atlantic and North Pacific, on the contrary, the warm water appears to divide the cold, and to squeeze it out along the land at the sides. The impression made by the cold current from Baffin's Bay upon the Gulf Stream is strikingly beautiful.

743. The great bend in the Gulf Stream.—Another feature of the sea expressed by this plate is a sort of reflection or recast of the shore-line in the temperature of the water. This feature is most striking in the North Pacific and Indian Oceans. The remarkable intrusion of the cool into the volume of warm waters to the southward of the Aleutian Islands is not unlike that (§ 731) which the cool waters from Davis' Straits make in the Atlantic upon the Gulf Stream. In sailing through this " horse-shoe," or bend in the Gulf Stream (§ 731), Captain N. B. Grant, of the American ship "Lady Arbella," bound from Hamburgh to New York, in May, 1854, passed, from daylight to noon, twenty-four large "bergs," besides several small ones, "the whole ocean, as far as the eye could reach, being literally covered with them, I should," he continued, "judge the average height of them above the surface of the sea to be about sixty feet; some five or six of them were at least twice that height, and, with their frozen peaks jutting up in the most fantastic shapes, presented a truly sublime spectacle."

744. The horse-shoe in the Japan current,—The "horse-shoe" of cold in the warm water of the North Pacific, though extending 5 degrees farther towards the south, cannot be the harbour for such icebergs. The cradle of those of the Atlantic was perhaps in the Frozen Ocean, for they may have come thence through Baffin's Bay. But in the Pacific there is no nursery for them. The water in Behring's Strait is too shallow to let them pass from that ocean into the Pacific, and the climates of Russian America do not favour the formation of large bergs. But, though we do not find in the North Pacific the physical conditions which generate icebergs like those of the Atlantic, we find them as abundant with fogs. The line of separation between the warm and cold water assures us of these conditions.

745. The animalculæ of the sea.—What beautiful, grand, and benign ideas do we not see expressed in that immense body of warm waters which are gathered together in the middle of the Pacific and Indian Oceans! It is the womb of the sea. In it coral islands innumerable have been fashioned, and pearls formed