Excerpt from The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life: Being the Second Series of a Descriptive History of the Life of the Globe To the majority of mankind grouped in crowded populations on the continents, extending over scarcely a quarter of the surface of the globe, the sea is little else than a vast abyss without limits or bottom. Even learned men are inclined, by an illusion of intellectual optics, to give a much greater geographical importance to the phenomena of continental regions, than to those of the ocean. Just as our ancestors, beholding infinite space filled with stars and nebulae arched over their heads, imagined this immensity to be a dome resting on the vast structure of the earth. Although the influence of the ocean in the general economy of the globe has not been studied with the same care, relatively, as the effect of the rivers which flow through the plains, or of the springs which gush from the clefts of the hills, yet it is still of the first importance, and on it all the phenomena of planetary life depend. "Water is the chief of all!" exclaimed Pindar in the early days of Hellenic civilization; and since then science has revealed to us, that the continents themselves are elaborated in the bosom of the seas, and that without them earth, like a metallic surface, could give birth to no organic life whatever. Thus, as almost all the cosmogonies of primitive nations poetically declare, earth is "The daughter of ocean." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."