[CHAP. XXII.]
THE PRIMITIVE OCEAN.
The Giant-Book of the Earth-rind.—The Sea of Fire.—Formation of a solid Earth-crust by cooling.—The Primitive Waters.—First awakening of Life in the Bosom of the Ocean.—The Reign of the Saurians.—The future Ocean.
The greatest of all histories, traced in mighty characters by the Almighty himself, is that of the earth-rind. The leaves of this giant volume are the strata which have been successively deposited in the bosom of the sea, or raised by volcanic powers from the depths of the earth; the wars which it relates are the Titanic conflicts of two hostile elements, water and fire, each anxious to destroy the formations of its opponent; and the historic documents which bear witness to that ancient strife lie before us in the petrified or carbonified remains of extinct forms of organic existence—the medals of creation.
It is only since yesterday that science has attempted to unriddle the hieroglyphics in which the past history of our planet reveals itself to man, and it stands to reason that in so difficult a study truth must often be obscured by error; but although the geologist is still a mere scholar, endeavouring to decipher the first chapters of a voluminous work, yet even now the study of the physical revolutions of our globe distinctly points out a period when the molten earth wandered, a ball of liquid fire, through the desert realms of space. In those times, so distant from ours that even the wildest flight of imagination is unable to carry us over the intervening abyss, the waters of the ocean were as yet mixed with the air, and formed a thick and hazy atmosphere through which no radiant sunbeam, no soft lunar light, ever penetrated to the fiery billows of molten rock, which at that time covered the whole surface of the earth. What pictures of desolation rise before our fancy, at the idea of yon boundless ocean of fluid stone, which rolled from pole to pole without meeting on its wide way anything but itself. Ever and ever in the dark-red clouds shone the reflection of that vast conflagration, witnessed only by the eye of the Almighty, for organic life could not exist on a globe which exclusively obeyed the physical and chemical laws of inorganic nature.
But while the fiery mass with its surrounding atmosphere was circling through the icy regions of ethereal space (the temperature of which is computed to be lower than 60° R. below freezing point), it gradually cooled, and its hitherto fluid surface began to harden to a solid crust. Who can tell how many countless ages may have dropped one after the other into the abyss of the past, ere thus much was accomplished; for the dense atmosphere constantly threw back again upon the fiery earth-ball the heat radiating from its surface, and the caloric of the vast body could escape but very slowly into vacant space?
Thus millions of years may have gone by before the aqueous vapours, now no longer obstinately repelled by the cooling earth-rind, condensed into rain, and, falling in showers, gave birth to an incipient ocean. But it must not be supposed that the waters obtained at once a tranquil and undisturbed possession of their new domain, for, as soon as they descended upon the earth, those endless elementary wars began, which, with various fortunes, have continued to the present day.
As soon as the cooling earth-rind began to harden, it naturally contracted, like all solid bodies when no longer subject to the influence of expanding heat, and thus in the thin crust enormous fissures and rents were formed, through which the fluid masses below gushed forth, and, spreading in wide sheets over the surface, once more converted into vapours the waters they met with in their fiery path.
But after all these revolutions and vicissitudes which opposed the birth of ocean, perpetually destroying its perpetually renewed formation, we come at last to a period when, in consequence of the constantly decreasing temperature of the earth-rind, and its increasing thickness, the waters at last conquered a permanent abode on its surface, and the oceanic empire was definitively founded.