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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    THE WIDE AND DEEP SEA. Of the habitable land of the earth there is such a vast extent spread out, that if a man were able to set his foot upon a fresh square mile of it every successive minute of time, he would be seventy-six years before he had trodden upon every square mile. The wide sea, however, is so much more extensive, that if a man were able to drop a stone into a fresh square mile of it every successive minute, it would be two centuries and twenty-eight years before every square mile of the great waters would have its stone. There are about thirty-eight millions of square miles of land upon the earth, but there are 114 millions of square miles of water. The wide sea is three times as large as the broad land. The relative sizes of the land and sea depend upon the way in which the hollows and projections of the earth's solid surface are arranged, and upon the actual quantity of the liquid which has to be accommodated in the deepest parts of the hollows. The cause of the presence of a sea is merely this;—the liquid substance of water cannot cohere, and hang together as stones, and the rocks and hills, do. Consequently water cannot be laid on the earth's surface in a lump. Its particles tumble over and over each other until all are equally sustained from beneath, and at the sides. The earth's natural liquid—water—thus invariably runs down until it has got as near as it can to the attracting centre, the middle of the earth. If there were enough of this natural liquid belonging to the earth, it would fill up all the hollows and depressions until it rose above the tops of the highest mountains, and the whole surface of the globe would be sea. As