The air, heated and dried as it sweeps over the arid surface of the soil, drinks up by day myriads of tons of moisture from the sea,--so much, indeed, that, were none restored to it, the surface of the ocean would be depressed eight or ten feet annually. We do not certainly know the height of the atmosphere. It is said that its upper surface cannot lie nearer to us than fifty, and can scarcely be further off than five hundred, miles. "It surrounds us on all sides, yet we cannot see it; it presses on us with a weight of fifteen pounds on every square inch of the surface of our bodies--in other words, we are at all times sustaining a load of between seventy and one hundred tons of it on our persons--yet we do not feel it! Softer than the finest down, more impalpable than the lightest gossamer, it leaves the cobweb undisturbed, and, at times, scarcely stirs the most delicate flower that feeds on the dew it supplies; yet it bears the fleets of nations on its wings round the world, and crushes the most refractory substances with its weight. It bends the rays of the sun from their path to give us the aurora of the morning and the twilight of evening. It disperses and refracts their various tints to beautify the approach and the retreat of the orb of day. But for the atmosphere, sunshine would burst on us in a moment and fail us in the twinkling of an eye, removing us in an instant from midnight darkness to the blaze of noon." We have written a good deal on this subject, yet the thousandth part has not been told of even the grand and more obvious operations of the atmosphere, much less the actions and results of its minor and invisible processes. Were we to descend with philosophers into the minuter laboratories of the world, and consider the permeating, ramifying, subtle part the atmosphere plays in the innumerable transformations that are perpetually going on around and within us, we should be constrained to feel more deeply than we have ever yet felt, that the works of the Creator are indeed wonderful beyond all expression or conception. CHAPTER SEVEN. WATERSPOUTS--CAUSES OF--APPEARANCE--ELECTRICITY--EXPERIMENTS--ARTIFICIAL WATERSPOUTS--SHOWERS OF FISH--MR. ELLIS ON WATERSPOUTS IN THE SOUTH SEAS. We turn back now from the atmospheric to the aqueous ocean. Yet so intimate is the connection between the two, that we shall find it impossible to avoid occasional reference to the former. Our present subject, _waterspouts_, obliges us to recur for a little to the atmosphere, which we dismissed, or attempted to dismiss, in the last chapter.