The wide and deep sea.

Date:
[between 1850 and 1859?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The wide and deep sea. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    up with the water which is still contained in the basin. The water of the sea is never diminished, as has been already seen; it is never all steamed away to the fur- forming point, because fresh water is added as fast as the steam is removed. Sea-water is salt, instead of being fresh. The sea contains so much solid substance in its clear-looking water, that if this were all taken out from the water and dried, there would be enough of it to cover up to the depth of one mile, a land, one hundred and forty times as large as England! In every pint of sea-water there is more than half an ounce of solid substance dissolved and hidden away. Three quarters of this solid are common salt. The rest is principally lime, magnesia, potash, soda, and iron. Sea-water is therefore brine rather than water. A considerable quantity of these solid matters, which are dissolved and hidden away in sea-water, and which so convert that water into brine, are the materials which are brought down, day by day, by the running rivers into its basin, and which then must remain there, because they cannot escape with the vapour that is steamed up into the atmosphere. They are the impurities which would form a fur on the sides and bottoms of the basin, if the entire supply of liquid were steamed away. It is probable that the waters of the ocean were salt from the very beginning. But however this may be, there can be no doubt that there is quite a sufficient reason for their saltness, in the combined influences of these operations. They must have become salt from these causes, if they had been ever so fresh at the first. More and more solid matter is being carried down into the sea by the rivers every day and every year. Yet, strange to say, its water does not become moi^e salt. There is just the same half-ounce of solid sub- stance in every pint of sea-water now, which there was when this liquid was first carefully examined by man. There are now multitudes of living workmen