Aspects of nature, in different lands and different climates (Vol. 2 of 2) / with scientific elucidations

BY ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. TRANSLATED BY MRS. SABINE. IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
LONDON: PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS, PATERNOSTER ROW; AND JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1849.
Wilson and Ogilvy, Skinner Street, Snowhill, London.
ASPECTS OF NATURE IN DIFFERENT LANDS AND DIFFERENT CLIMATES.
According to Ehrenberg’s brilliant discovery, the yellow sand or dust which falls like rain on the Atlantic near the Cape de Verde Islands, and is occasionally carried even to Italy and Middle Europe, consists of a multitude of siliceous-shelled microscopic animals. Perhaps many of them float for years in the upper strata of the atmosphere, until they are brought down by vertical currents or in accompaniment with the superior current of the trade-winds, still susceptible of revivification, and multiplying their species by spontaneous division in conformity with the particular laws of their organisation.
If the aereal ocean in which we are submerged, and above the surface of which we cannot rise, be indispensable to the existence of organised beings, they also require a more substantial aliment, which they can find only at the bottom of this gaseous ocean. This bottom is of two kinds; the smaller portion consisting of dry land in immediate contact with the external atmosphere, and the larger portion consisting of water, which may perhaps have been formed thousands of years ago by electric agencies from gaseous substances, and which is now incessantly undergoing decomposition in the laboratories of Nature, in the clouds and in the pulsating vessels of animals and plants. Organic forms also descend deep below the surface of the earth, wherever rain or surface water can percolate either by natural cavities or by mines or other excavations made by man: the subterranean cryptogamic Flora was an object of my scientific research in the early part of my life. Thermal springs of very high temperature nourish small Hydropores, Confervæ, and Oscillatoria. At Bear Lake, near the Arctic Circle, Richardson saw the ground, which continues frozen throughout the summer at a depth of twenty inches, covered with flowering plants.