Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/208

194 with the earthquake-shocks and slight movements of depression which have occurred in North America. It is possible that these slow and secular movements may go on uninterruptedly until considerable changes are produced; but it is quite as likely that they may be retarded or reversed. It is possible, on the other hand, that after the long period of quiescence which has elapsed there may be a new settlement of the ocean-bed, accompanied with foldings of the crust, especially on the western side of the Atlantic, and possibly with renewed volcanic activity on its eastern margin. In either case a long time relatively to our limited human chronology may intervene before the occurrence of any marked change.

On the whole, the experience of the past would lead us to expect movements and eruptive discharges in the Pacific rather than in the Atlantic area. It is therefore not unlikely that the Atlantic may remain undisturbed, unless secondarily and indirectly, until after the Pacific area shall have attained to a greater degree of quiescence than at present. But this subject is one too much involved in uncertainty to warrant us in following it further. In the mean time the Atlantic is to us a practically permanent ocean, varying only in its tides, its currents, and its winds, which science has already reduced to definite laws, so that we can use if we can not regulate them. It is ours to take advantage of this precious time of quietude, and to extend the blessings of science and of our Christian civilization from shore to shore until there shall be no more sea, not in the sense of that final drying-up of Old Ocean to which some physicists look forward, but in the higher sense of its ceasing to be the emblem of unrest and disturbance and the cause of isolation.

I must now close this address with a short statement of the general objects which I have had in view in directing your attention to the geological development of the Atlantic. We can not, I think, consider the topics to which I have referred without perceiving that the history of ocean and continent is an example of progressive design, quite as much as that of living beings. Nor can we fail to see that, while in some important directions we have penetrated the great secret of Nature in reference to the general plan and structure of the earth and its waters and the changes through which they have passed, we have still very much to learn, and perhaps quite as much to unlearn, and that the future holds out to us and to our successors higher, grander, and clearer conceptions than those to which we have yet attained. The vastness and the might of Ocean, and the manner in which it cherishes the feeblest and most fragile beings, alike speak to us of Him who holds it in the hollow of his hand, and gave to it of old its boundaries and its laws; but its teaching ascends to a higher tone when we consider its origin and history, and the manner in which it has been made to build up continents and mountain-chains, and at the same time to nourish and sustain the teeming life of sea and land.