[48] Shakespere: "Titus Andronicus."
To make the thing seem doubly sure, let us reflect with Mr. Burroughs that the world is now probably in a time of spring, following the latest of the Ice Ages. If so, the water now locked up in snow-fields and glaciers among the mountain peaks will, before this summer of the centuries is over, all melt back into the sea. This alone will be good for a rise of some thirty feet in sea level.
Then, still later, we shall no doubt have another Ice Age, and the only thing that may save us from being frozen to death is the fact that we have previously been drowned!
II. The Builder
But it's all a bad dream; a delusion of the mind, and of the eye. We see these things—the destruction of the land, the invasions of the sea—but we do not see them as they are because we do not see far enough. Looked at broadly, and reading the story of it to the end, we learn that the whole relation of the sea to the land and its life and beauty is that of a builder and fatherly provider. Far from being the savage creature he has been pictured, Father Neptune seems to have the kindly disposition of old King Cole combined with the wisdom of King Solomon. Everywhere is evidence not only of the highest intelligence but of good will toward man and his brother tenants of the waters, fields, and woods.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SEA IS THIS
To begin with you remember it was the sea that helped put the world on the map. Of course, if we had not already learned in the story of how the continents came up out of the sea, that there is no cause for alarm, we might imagine that having been lifted up they might, by a reversal of the process, be lifted down again. Indeed, I find a writer in a popular periodical dealing in science stating that "every part of the sea floor becomes, in its turn, the shore line and is subjected to the wear of the waves." But, as a matter of fact, we know that the continents have finally got their land legs; that for ages the transgressions of the sea have been mainly confined to the continental margins; and that unless the earth's shrunken centre should, from some unimaginable cause, swell back to its old size, it is mechanically impossible for the entire bottoms of the vast reservoirs of the sea to be raised.
HARBOR ENGINEERING OF THE RIVERS AND THE SEA
In the mouths of certain rivers emptying into the sea the tides come rushing up in a roaring wave like this. When the tide goes out the water flows back again. This back-and-forth motion helps to broaden the harbor made by the river's mouth, as in the case of New York Harbor, which is the mouth of the Hudson. Owing to this tidal action the water of the Hudson backs up clear to Albany.