vision.
The captain referred to was bound for England. On his return voyage he
fell in with the same mass of medusae off the Western Islands, and was
three or four days in sailing through them. Now, the Western Islands is
a great place of resort for the whale, and thither had the Gulf Stream
been commissioned to convey immense quantities of its peculiar food.

We might enlarge endlessly on this great ocean current, but enough, we
think, has been said to show that the sea, instead of being an ocean of
unchanging drops, driven about at random by the power of stormy winds,
is a mighty flood flowing in an appointed course--steady, regular, and
systematic in its motions, varied and wonderful in its actions, benign
and sweet in its influences, as it sweeps mound and round the world,
fulfilling the will of its great Creator.

CHAPTER FIVE.

THE ATMOSPHERIC OCEAN--ORDER IN ITS FLOW--OFFICES OF THE ATMOSPHERE--
DANGERS LESSENED BY SCIENCE--CURRENTS OF ATMOSPHERE--CAUSE OF WIND--TWO
GREAT CURRENTS--DISTURBING INFLUENCES--CALMS--VARIABLE WINDS--CAUSES
THEREOF--LOCAL CAUSES OF DISTURBANCE--GULF STREAM--INFLUENCE--THE WINDS
MAPPED OUT--A SUPPOSED CASE.

Fish are not the only creatures that live in this ocean. The human
inhabitants of Earth, dwell at the bottom of an ocean of air, which
encircles the globe. Fish, however, have the advantage of us, inasmuch
as they can float and dart about in their ocean, while we, like the
crabs, can only crawl about at the bottom of ours.

This atmospheric ocean is so closely connected with the sea, and
exercises upon it so constant, universal, and important an influence,
that to omit, in a work of this kind, very special reference to the
winds, would be almost as egregious an oversight as to ignore the waves.

Wind, or atmospheric air in motion, is the cause of storms, of waves, of
water-transport through the sky, and of an incalculable amount of varied
phenomena on land and sea. Without this great agent no visible motion
would ever take place in the sea. Its great currents, indeed, might
flow on (though even that is questionable), but its surface would never
present any other aspect than that of an unruffled sheet of clear glass.
The air, then, becomes in this place an appropriate subject of
consideration. The Voice of Ocean has something very emphatic to say
about the atmosphere.

In regard to its nature, it is sufficient to say that atmospheric air is
composed of two gases--ox