A SERMON FROM THE OCEAN-BED.
Oun Leading Journal relates the most striking event to which we are at present looking forward, and draws from it a sufficiently practical moral ; but the event points, we think, to a yet larger and higher moral. Within a few short -weeks two vessels will meet in the middle of the Atlantic and hold a conference by deputy of Europe and America. The two vessels will meet to separate again, each gradually laying down, as the distance between them widens, a portion of the cable destined to bear electric messages between Ireland and Newfoundland. In laying down that cable, 2600 miles in length by the end of May next, the large sum of 350,000/. is to lie expended, under a guarantee by the British Government, although it is still a question whether the electric power can convey its messages through so great a length of wire. It is an experiment, but well worth the making. The Times seizes the occasion to describe the exact nature of the monopoly given through a company to Newfoundland : that island is the portion of America nearest to the opposite continent, and it is thus necessarily the part through which the telegraph must pass. But a little more knowledge of the laws under which electricity works its way: will probably show that we cannot send messages through a wire of that length; and then we must seek a circuitous route far to the North of Newfoundland. Or it may show that we can send them with equal ease through a greater length • and then the additional company which is already contemplated by enterprising Americans will not find in nature any insurmountable obstacle to its own project. The grand experiment which the Government of this country is about to make, in conjunction with the United States and with the commercial public here finds a far higher and more instructive moral in an admirable paper in the Edinburgh Review on the "Physical Geography of the Sea." The wonderful results which a comparatively humble investigation have produced by the force of electricity, might teach us to investigate nature a little more, and to be a little less abrupt than we have been in ending our inquiry by premature conclusions. "it is but a hundredand-fifty years since this electrical (lotion, or force, was known to mankind only in its elementary aspects of attraction and repulsion," and now it is seen working, by some agency at present mysterious to us, in nearly all the relations of life, not less important than the telegraph or the photograph. "Acting in the form of magnetism [if magnetism be a form of electricity] through and on all parts of the globe, solid, fluid, and aerial, it is brought before us in a new aspect by Professor Faraday's discovery of the magnetic properties of oxygen as modified by heat. Even that other subtile element of light—if, indeed, it be another and separate element—may in some sort affect the atmosphere through which its action is transmitted to the earth and ocean below. A.r; associated with, or, according to a recent philosophy, concerted into heat, there can be no doubt of this influence." . . . .
"If modem science finds cause to be proud of what it has achieved in these great discoveries, there is ample reason for humility in the many questions which still remain unsolved; even such as lie at the very origin of the subject, and were matter of speculation and perplexity to its earliest cultivators."
Maturer wisdom has taught us that the conclusions at which we had formerly arrived were but barriers in the path of scientific progress. We have a great deal more to observe before we can form any conclusions before we eau even name the results which are unfolding themselves to our eyes. We have undertaken in our ignorance, to draw distinctions between matter and spirit—to assert that there is no matter, or no spirit—to assume an identity of material form in iron, in the electric "fluid," in light and heat, distinguishing that the two latter are "imponderable bodies "; and we have ventured upon these assumptions after we have dissolved the "elements " of our ancestors.
The whole ignorant in the Edinburgh Review is an eloquent re buke to this propensity of conclusion. By the samepresumptuous interpretation we have accustomed ourselves to talk as if the creation were made for man, who stands upon a single speck in_ one single group in that immense firmament which has only within these few years been revealed to our eyes—and. how revealed? By investigations into a property of glass, that transparent body, before we have learned to ascertain the reason, or anything like a reason, why one body is opaque or another transparent—why the condition of one substance to another substance converts opaqueness into transparency. How much we can observe without understanding a tithe of what we observe! How much we can learn by observing, how much better we can conform our life to the laws of life in general, if we do not superadd some presumption of human vanity ! We have asserted the existence of "design" in the creation,— an imperfect word, because it applies human conception to a process altogether superhuman. But yet more presumptuous tools have asserted the absence of design, and have thought they spoke more philosophically when they described matter as arranging itself by its own laws—Heaven knows how ! In those days they talked about "the waste of waters "—the ocean was a desert, swayed backwards and forwards by "winds that knew no law." One quiet philosopher, who finds time to do a large amount of ordinary work, went forth on various occasions to study nature in situ • others have copied his method of observing ; and by simply looking on, we have learned more than by centuries of 'philosophy." We are beginning to learn with Colonel Reid, that even the wind has its laws ; and instead of a desert, the wean becomes a scene crowded with life and orderly motion. There is the Gulph stream, a river in the ocean, with banks of waves, and a bed beneath it of cold water. The distinction between that river and the banks can be seen with the eye. The stream performs its allotted circle flowing to the North and back to this island. The whale avoids its tepid waters as enfeebling the very flesh of the great mammal ; while the flood bears from the Equator masses of marine vegetable or animal productions that form the food for floating tribes in the Northern Ocean.
"Whenever a circuit of waters is thus formed, we have every reason, from tidal and other analogies, to look for an intermediate or central space, comparatively calm and motionless. And such a space is actually found to exist within this great ocean whirlpool. The Mar de Sargasso,' as the Spanish navigators termed the central portion of the Atlantic, stretching Westwards from the Canaries and Cape Vent Islands—a surface fifteen times greater than that of Great Britain—may be described as a vast stagnant pool, receiving the drift sea-weed, which the surrounding currents fling into it, and generating on its calm surface what has been well called an oceanic meadow' of sea-weed, the fucus natans of botanists. It is in this tract of sea that we find such wonderful species of fuci as the Macrocystic pyrifera, having stems from 1000 to 1500 feet in length, and but a finger's size in thickness, branching upwards into filaments like packthread. This vast domain of marine vegetable life is the receptacle, as indeed are the waters of the ocean generally, of an equal profusion of animal existence —from the minute luminiferous organisms, which, to borrow Humboldt's phrase, convert every wave into a crest of light,' to those larger forms of life, many of which derive nutriment from the waters alone, thus richly impregnated with living animal matter. Reason and imagination are equally confounded by the effort to conceive these hosts of individual existenees,—cette richesse cfrayante, as Cuvier terms it,—generated or annihi
lated at every passing instant of time. No scheme of numbers can reach
them even by approximation; • and science is forced to submit its deductions to the general law, that all the materials of organic life are in a state
of unceasing change, displacement and replacement, under new forms and altered functions, for purposes which we must believe to be wisely designed, but which transcend all human intelligence."
In that same ocean, thus ordered for the " inferior " beings, 'a found that natural ridge, a submarine sierra, on which is to Lt. laid the electric cable --the human animal having, by an inspiration which we have never yet understood, been incited. to " discover " that same sierra, and to commence, in this year of grace 1857, that vast cable•which is literally to bring the thoughts of the two continents together. And after that, the philosopher thinks it wiser to talk about "chance," or "the laws of matter," than to use that little word "design,"—which is but weak human language trying to express a sense of the vast and complicated systems which we are permitted thus to contemplate for our blessing.
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