Page:The ocean and its wonders.djvu/38



HEN a man stands on the deck of some ship, holding on to the weather bulwarks, and gazing with unphilosophic eye through the blinding spray at the fury of the tempest—by which the billows are made to roll around him like liquid mountains, and the ship is tossed beneath him like a mere chip, the sport and plaything of the raging waters—he is apt to think, should his thoughts turn in that direction at all, that all is unmitigated confusion; that the winds, which blew west yesterday and blow east ,—shifting, it may be, with gusty squalls, now here, now there, in chaotic fury,—are actuated by no laws, governed by no directing power.

Yet no thought could be more unphilosophical than this. Apart altogether from divine revelation, by which we are informed that “all deeps, fire, and hail, snow, and vapour, and stormy wind,” are