The Indian and the American streams have this in common, that, starting from the Line, from the electric centre of the globe, they carry with them immense powers of creation and agitation. On the one hand they seem the deep and teeming womb of a whole world of living creatures; on the other hand, they are the centre and the vehicle of tempests, whirlwinds, and water spouts. So much nursing gentleness and so much destroying fury; have we not here a great contradiction? No, it proves only that the fury disturbs only the exterior and not any considerable depths. The weakest creatures, shelled atomies, the microscopic medusæ, fluid creatures that a mere touch dissolves, availing themselves of the same current, sail, in all safety, though the tempest is loud and fierce right above them. Few of them reach our shores; they are met at Newfoundland by the cold stream from the Pole, which slays them by myriads. Newfoundland is the very bone-house of these frost-stricken voyagers. The lightest remain in suspension, even after death; but at length sink, like snowy showers to the depths, where they deposit those banks of shells which extend from Ireland to America. Murray calls the Indian and American streams of hot water, _the two Milky Ways of the sea_. So similar in color, heat, direction, and describing precisely the same curve, they yet have not the same destiny. The American, at the very outset, enters an inclement sea, the Atlantic, which, open to the North, bears down the floating army of icebergs from the Pole, and it thus early parts with much of its heat. The Indian stream, on the contrary, first circulating among the isles, reaches a closed sea well protected from the North, and thus for a long time preserves its original heat, electric and creative, and traces upon our globe an enormous train of life. Its centre is the apogee of terrestrial energy, in vegetable treasures, in monsters, in spices, in poisons. From the secondary currents which it gives off, and which flow towards the North, results another world, that of the Sea of Coral. There, says Maury, over a space as large as the four continents the polypes are industriously building thousands of islands, shoals, and reefs, which are gradually studding and dividing that sea; shoals which at present are the annoyance and the dread of the mariner, but which will at length rise to the surface, join together to form a continent, which, some day--who knows? may be the refuge of the human race, when flood, or fire, or earthquake, leave it no other shelter. John Reynaud in his fine article in the _Encyclopedie_, remarks that our world is not solitary. The infinitely complicated curve which it describes represents the forces, the various influences, which act upon her, and bear testimony to her connection and communication with the great luminaries of the Heavens.