German Dreams! But are they, in feet, entirely Dreams? More than one great mind, without going quite so far, seem to admit for both Earth and Sea a kind of obscure personality. Ritter and Lyell say: "The Earth labors herself; can she be impotent to organise herself? How are we to imagine that the creative power which we observe in every being on the globe can be denied to the globe itself?" But how does the globe act? How at the present time does it obtain accretion? From the Sea and its living denizens. The full solution of these great questions would require a more profound study of Physiology than we as yet have made. Nevertheless, during the last twenty years every thing tends this way: 1. We have studied the irregular and exterior phase of the movements of the Sea, we have inquired into the _Law of Storms_. 2. We have studied the movements proper to the Sea, its _currents_, the play of its arteries and veins, of which the first propel the salt water from the Equator to the Poles, while the second return it, freshened, to the Equator: 3. The third and more difficult question on which modern chemistry will throw light, is that as to the real nature of the marine _mucus_, of that unctuous gelatine which is every where found in Sea water, and which appears to be a living liquid. It is quite recently that the sounding of Brooke, and more especially the soundings for the submarine telegraph from Europe to America, have begun to reveal the secrets of the bottom of the Sea. Are its lowest depths peopled? Formerly, that was denied, but Forbes and James Ross found life throughout them. Previous to those splendid discoveries, which were made less than twenty years ago, the book of the Sea could not be written. The first attempt at writing it was made by M. Hartwig. For my own part, I was still far from the idea of writing it when, in 1845, in preparing my book of "The People," I commenced, in Normandy, my study of the population of the Coasts. In the fifteen subsequent years, this vast and difficult subject has been continually growing upon me, and has followed me from shore to shore.