But if you watch the waves carefully and study them a little you will see underlying and controlling this apparent anarchy the wonderful engineering by which the machinery of the sea works out its appointed tasks. It is when the earth has gathered its harvests and laid down to its winter rest that the sea begins gathering harvests of its own, grinding up the rocks for food for the plants in its gardens, for new clothes for its shell-fish, and new soil for earth harvests in millenniums yet to be.
I. The Destroyer
On the face of it the case looks bad. The sea's chief business seems to be that of eating us up, or at least the lands on which we live. And this idea of it we find running through all literature and art. A very large number of the pictures of the sea, probably the majority, show it in wind and storm. And this is still more true of the famous sea pictures of literature. Shakespere, for example, makes some three hundred references to the sea, and nearly always, where he gives it a character, it is that of a monster, always hungry and never satisfied, a "wild, rude sea," a sea "raging like an angry boar"—and so back to Homer and forward to Kipling.
That the sea is constantly eating away the land cannot be denied, and to an extent that is delightfully alarming if, as did the little boy listening to the tale of the giants, we "like to be made nervous." It is said that England still rules the waves, but where she fronts the sea on the east the coast is being cut back at the rate of two to four yards a year, in spite of all that modern engineering skill can do. In the course of a thousand years the losses on all fronts have amounted to over 500 square miles. Each year carries off 1,500 acres more from the king's domains, to add them to the Empire of the Sea, "and he calls to us still unfed." On the east coast the blows dealt by the waves in severe storms are such that the land trembles for a mile back from the shore. "The earth," said Emerson,[47] speaking of the industrial greatness of England, "shakes under the thunder of its mills." So for ages it has shaken under the thunder of the mills of the sea.
[47] "English Traits."
Courtesy of "The Scientific American"
SEA-CLIFFS IN THE SCHOOLROOM
These dizzy cliffs and the wide sea beyond were made in the schoolroom in the same way that the glacier and the iceberg were made in [Chagter II].
