eaders with it any further.

Scoresby tells us that the colour of the Greenland Sea varies from
ultramarine blue to olive-green, from the purest transparency to
striking opacity; and that these colours are permanent, and do not
depend on the state of the weather, but on the quality of the water. He
observed that whales were found in much greater numbers in the green
than in the blue water; and he found, on examining the former with the
microscope, that its opacity and its colour were due to countless
multitudes of those animalcules on which the whale feeds.

We need scarcely remark that it is utterly beyond the power of man to
form anything approaching to a correct conception of the amount of
_life_ that is thus shown to exist in the ocean. Although it has
pleased the Creator to limit our powers, yet it has also pleased him to
leave the limit of those powers undefined. We may not, indeed, ever
hope in this life to attain to perfect knowledge, nevertheless, by
"searching" we may "find out wisdom;" and certain it is, that, although
there undoubtedly must be a point of knowledge on any given subject
which man cannot reach, there is in man a power incessantly to extend
his knowledge and increase his powers of conception, by each successive
effort that he makes in his course from the cradle to the grave.

Even although we were told the exact number of the little creatures that
inhabit the sea, we could not, by any simple effort of the mind, however
powerful, form a conception of what that number implied. We might shut
ourselves up like the hermits of old, abstract our thoughts from all
other things, and ponder the subject for weeks or months together, and
at the termination of our effort we should be as wise as we were at its
commencement, but no wiser. But by searching round the subject, and
comparing lesser things with greater, although we should still fail to
arrive at a full comprehension of the truth, we may advance our powers
of conception very considerably beyond the point attained by our first
effort; and which point, as we have said, could not be surmounted by a
hair's breadth by the mere exertion of simple or abstract thought.

Dr Scoresby's remarks on the subject of animal life in the ocean, are
so graphic and curious that we extract the passages verbatim from the
admirable memoir of that gentleman, written by his nephew. He says:

"I procured a quantity of snow from a piece of ice that had been washed
b