irdle of clouds almost
similar to the sidereal rings.

In this gloomy, hot sea was the heart of the ocean, the center of the
circulatory life of the planet. The sky was a regulator that, absorbing
and returning, restored the evaporation to equilibrium. From this place
were sent forth the rains and dews to all the rest of the earth,
modifying its temperatures favorably for the development of animal and
vegetable life. There were exchanged the exhalations of the two worlds;
and, converted into clouds, the water of the southern hemisphere--the
hemisphere of the great seas with no other points of relief than the
triangular extremities of Africa and America, and the humps of the
oceanic archipelagoes--was always reinforcing the rills and rivers of
the northern hemisphere with its inhabited lands.

From this equatorial zone, the heart of the globe, come forth two
rivers of tepid water that heat the coasts of the north. They are the
two currents that issue from the Gulf of Mexico and the Java Sea. Their
enormous liquid masses, fleeing ceaselessly from the equator, govern a
vast assemblage of water from the poles that comes to occupy their
space, and these chilled and fresher currents are constantly
precipitating themselves on the electric hearth of the equator that
warms and salts them anew, renewing with its systole and diastole the
life of the world. The ocean struggles vainly to condense these two
warm currents without ever succeeding in mingling itself with them.
They are torrents of a deep blue, almost black, that flow across the
cold and green waters.

The Atlantic current, upon reaching Newfoundland, divides its arms,
sending one of them to the North Pole. With the other, weak and
exhausted by its long journey, it modifies the temperature of the
British Isles, tempering refreshingly the coasts of Norway. The Indian
current that the Japanese call, because of its color, "the black
river," circulates between the islands, maintaining for a longer time
than the other its prodigious powers of creation and agitation which
enable it to trail over the planet an enormous tail of life.

Its center is the apogee of terrestrial energy in the vegetable and
animal creations, in monsters and in fish. One of its arms, escaping
toward the south, goes on forming the mysterious world of the coral
sea. In a space as large as four continents, the polyps, strengthened
by the lukewarm water, are building up thousands of atolls, ring-shaped