A vast cloud of red animalcules, carried by a tempest from Orinoco to France, explained the great aërial current of the Southwest which brings to our Europe the rains that have their birth place in the far Cordilleras of South America.
But for the constant change of waters which is made by the currents in the depths of the sea, she would, in parts, be filled up with salt, sands, animal and vegetable remains and the like detritus. It would be another case of the Dead Sea, which, for want of movement, has its banks loaded with salt, its vegetation incrusted with salt, and the very winds that cross its surface, burning, withering, breathing only of famine and of death.
All the scattered observations upon currents of the air and of the water, the seasons, the winds and the tempests, were long confined to the memory of the fishermen and sailors, and too frequently died with them. Meteorology, that guide of navigation, for want of being systematized and centralized seemed vain, and was even denied rank and usefulness as a science. The illustrious M. Biot, demanded a strict account of the little that she had yet done. However, upon the two opposite shores of Europe and America, persevering men founded that neglected and denied science upon the basis of observation.
The latest and most celebrated of these observers, Maury the American, courageously undertook what a whole administration had recoiled from, viz., to extract from and arrange the contents of I know not what multitude of log books, those often confused and ill-kept records of the sea captains. These extracts, reduced into tables under regular heads, gave, in the result, rules and generalities. A congress of seamen assembled at Bruxelles decided that the observations, henceforth to be logged with more care, shall be sent from all parts to the observatory at Washington. A noble compliment, that, paid by Europe to young America and her patient and ingenious Maury, the learned poet of the sea. He has not only summed up and exemplified her laws; he has done much more, for, by the force of heart and by the love of nature as much as by positive results, he has carried the whole world with him. His charts and his first work, of which a hundred and fifty thousand copies were printed, are liberally distributed to sailors of all nations by the United States government. A number of eminent men in France and in Holland, Tricot, Jullien, Margole, Zurcher, and others, have made themselves the interpreters, the eloquent missionaries, of this apostle of the sea.
Why is it that in this matter America, so young, has outstripped Europe, so old? It is precisely because she is young, and burning with a desire to be in close connection with the whole globe. Upon her superb continent and in the midst of so many states, she yet deems herself solitary. So far from her European brother, she looks towards that centre of civilization as the earth looks toward the sun, and whatever seems to draw her into closer and more familiar connection with the grand old world, thrills her in every nerve. We have abundant proof of that from the joy, the intoxication, the perfect frenzy with which she hailed the completion of the submarine telegraph which joined the two distant shores, and promised that they should communicate within the brief space of minutes, in such wise that the two worlds should have but one thought.
TEMPESTS.