ides into
two arms, the principal one going towards the coast of Ireland and
Norway, whilst the second bends to the south about the height of the
Azores; then, touching the African shore, and describing a lengthened
oval, returns to the Antilles. This second arm--it is rather a collar
than an arm--surrounds with its circles of warm water that portion of
the cold, quiet, immovable ocean called the Sargasso Sea, a perfect
lake in the open Atlantic: it takes no less than three years for the
great current to pass round it. Such was the region the Nautilus was
now visiting, a perfect meadow, a close carpet of seaweed, fucus, and
tropical berries, so thick and so compact that the stem of a vessel
could hardly tear its way through it. And Captain Nemo, not wishing to
entangle his screw in this herbaceous mass, kept some yards beneath the
surface of the waves. The name Sargasso comes from the Spanish word
"sargazzo" which signifies kelp. This kelp, or berry-plant, is the
principal formation of this immense bank. And this is the reason why
these plants unite in the peaceful basin of the Atlantic. The only
explanation which can be given, he says, seems to me to result from the
experience known to all the world. Place in a vase some fragments of
cork or other floating body, and give to the water in the vase a
circular movement, the scattered fragments will unite in a group in the
centre of the liquid surface, that is to say, in the part least
agitated. In the phenomenon we are considering, the Atlantic is the
vase, the Gulf Stream the circular current, and the Sargasso Sea the
central point at which the floating bodies unite.

I share Maury's opinion, and I was able to study the phenomenon in the
very midst, where vessels rarely penetrate. Above us floated products
of all kinds, heaped up among these brownish plants; trunks of trees
torn from the Andes or the Rocky Mountains, and floated by the Amazon
or the Mississippi; numerous wrecks, remains of keels, or ships'
bottoms, side-planks stove in, and so weighted with shells and
barnacles that they could not again rise to the surface. And time will
one day justify Maury's other opinion, that these substances thus
accumulated for ages will become petrified by the action of the water
and will then form inexhaustible coal-mines--a precious reserve
prepared by far-seeing Nature for the moment when men shall have
exhausted the mines of continents.

In the midst of this inext