“THE HORSE LATITUDES”
are the belts of calms and light airs which border the polar edge of the north-east trade-winds. They are so called from the circumstance that vessels formerly bound from New England to the West Indies, with a deck-load of horses, were often so delayed in this calm belt of Cancer, that, from the want of water for their animals, they were compelled to throw a portion of them overboard.
“WHITE WATER” AND LUMINOUS ANIMALS AT SEA.
Captain Kingman, of the American clipper-ship Shooting Star, in lat. 8° 46′ S., long. 105° 30′ E., describes a patch of white water, about twenty-three miles in length, making the whole ocean appear like a plain covered with snow. He filled a 60-gallon tub with the water, and found it to contain small luminous particles seeming to be alive with worms and insects, resembling a grand display of rockets and serpents seen at a great distance in a dark night; some of the serpents appearing to be six inches in length, and very luminous. On being taken up, they emitted light until brought within a few feet of a lamp, when nothing was visible; but by aid of a sextant’s magnifier they could be plainly seen—a jelly-like substance, without colour. A specimen two inches long was visible to the naked eye; it was about the size of a large hair, and tapered at the ends. By bringing one end within about one-fourth of an inch of a lighted lamp, the flame was attracted towards it, and burned with a red light; the substance crisped in burning, something like hair, or appeared of a red heat before being consumed. In a glass of the water there were several small round substances (say 1/16th of an inch in diameter) which had the power of expanding and contracting; when expanded, the outer rim appeared like a circular saw, the teeth turned inward.
The scene from the clipper’s deck was one of awful grandeur: the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe will annihilate this material world.
INVENTION OF THE LOG.
Long before the introduction of the Log, hour-glasses were used to tell the distance in sailing. Columbus, Juan de la Cosa, Sebastian Cabot, and Vasco de Gama, were not acquainted with the Log and its mode of application; and they estimated the ship’s speed merely by the eye, while they found the distance they had made by the running-down of the sand in the ampotellas, or hour-glasses. The Log for the measurement of the distance traversed is stated by writers on navigation not to have been invented until the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century (see Encyclopædia Britannica, 7th edition, 1842). The precise date is not known; but it is certain that Pigafetta, the companion of Magellan, speaks, in 1521, of the Log as a well-known means of finding the course passed over. Navarete places the use of the log-line in English ships in 1577.
LIFE OF THE SEA-DEEPS.
The ocean teems with life, we know. Of the four elements of the old philosophers,—fire, earth, air, and water,—perhaps the sea most of all abounds with living creatures. The space occupied on the surface of our planet by the different families of animals and their remains is inversely as the size of the individual; the smaller the animal, generally speaking, the greater the space occupied by his remains. Take the elephant and his remains, and a microscopic animal and his, and compare them; the contrast as to space occupied is as striking as that of the coral reef or island with the dimensions of the whale. The graveyard that would hold the corallines, is larger than the graveyard that would hold the elephants.