th these winds alone, and with their bounding
seas which follow fast, the modern clipper, without auxiliary power, has
accomplished a greater distance in a day than any sea-steamer has ever
been known to reach. With these fine winds and heaving seas, those ships
have performed their voyages of circumnavigation in sixty days.

[Footnote 62: Formerly an officer of the navy, eminent for his scientific
researches and writings on maritime subjects; a native of Virginia.]

* * * * *

=_251._= THE GULF STREAM.

As a rule, the hottest water of the Gulf Stream is at, or near, the
surface; and as the deep-sea thermometer is sent down, it shows that
these waters, though still far warmer than the waters on either side
at corresponding depths, gradually become less and less warm until the
bottom of the current is reached. There is reason to believe that the
warm waters of the Gulf Stream are nowhere permitted, in the oceanic
economy, to touch the bottom of the sea. There is everywhere a cushion
of cool water, between them and the solid parts of the earth's crust.
This arrangement is suggestive, and strikingly beautiful. One of the
benign offices of the Gulf Stream is to convey heat from the Gulf of
Mexico, where otherwise it would become excessive, and to dispense it in
regions beyond the Atlantic, or the amelioration of the climates of the
British Islands and of all Western Europe. Now cold water is one of the
best non-conductors of heat, and if the warm water of the Gulf Stream
was sent across the Atlantic in contact with the solid crust of the
earth,--comparatively a good conductor of heat,--instead of being sent
across, as it is, in contact with a cold non-conducting cushion of cool
water to fend it from the bottom, much of its heat would be lost in the
first part of the way, and the soft climates of both France and England
would be, as that of Labrador, severe In the extreme, icebound, and
bitterly cold.

* * * * *

=_Ormsby M. Mitchell,[63] 1810-1862._=

=_252._= THE GREAT UNFINISHED PROBLEMS OF THE UNIVERSE.

I do not pretend to indorse the theory of Maedler with reference to his
central sun. If I did indorse it, it would amount simply to nothing at
all, for he needs no indorsement of mine. But it is one of the great
unfinished problems of the universe, which remains yet to be solved.
Future generations yet are to take it up. Materials for its solution ar