brilliant. It was reprinted in England, where, we are told by Mrs. Corbin, it passed through more than twenty editions. It was translated into the Swedish, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Italian languages. It received the encomiums of great reviews, and the plaudits of leading scientists like Quetelet and Humboldt. Its last edition in this country was prepared during the closing years of the author's life (1872-'73).

When the distress of 1861 came on, Maury, like Lee, believed it to be his duty to follow his native State. He resigned with pain a post which he had filled to the honor of his country, and humbly took a station in which his great talents had no adequate field. When peace came, it found him with his family in England, without a home and without a country. After trying in vain to find both in Mexico, he availed himself of the Act of Amnesty, issued at Washington in 1868, and returned to Virginia. He had been offered the directorship of the Imperial Observatory at Paris, and the chancellorship of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. He declined both, but accepted the chair of physics in the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, and here he died February 1, 1873. A few months later his body was borne through the Goshen Pass "when the ivy was blooming," to be laid in the Virginia Valhalla at Hollywood, Richmond.

one that had the He had the winbelong to the men

Of Maury's personality it may be said that no privilege of meeting him ever forgot the event. ning manner and kindly address which seemed to of his race and section. No worthy young fellow ever felt ignored or oppressed in his presence. He wore his honors easily, but while he valued the public tributes he received, he was not fond of displaying the insignia which came with them. He would put on those jewels sometimes in the privacy of home to gratify his children. He loved the little ones, and if to be childlike is to be perfect he was charmingly complete. His conversation was interesting to the thoughtful in the richness of the lessons he drew from common things. He would couple facts, regarded by others as unconnected, and thereby disclose unsuspected relations. It takes genius to make the rejected refuse of one generation the valuable ore of a succeeding one. This detection of a hidden meaning in the simplest matters shows the inexhaustible nature of truth, and is the mark of a superior mind.

We have spoken of the splendid acknowledgments promptly given to this great American by foreign countries and by European philosophers. To be candid, we must say that in his own land he was less fortunate. The American public honored him, but from official superiors and scientific compeers he often received scant

appreciation. Especially heavy has been the censure visited upon him, not so much by open rebuke as by silent neglect, by the victorious section in the Civil War. His name is carefully omitted in official records of the departments he created. Most of his comrades have been forgiven, and some advanced to Halls of Fame; but he, the lovable and brilliant American, remains apparently condemned. Public libraries may be found where no one of his works can be procured. But the world moves and moves upward. The day will come when in the city where his great work was done a column will arise to tell posterity that the American people are too great to forget the achievements of one of their greatest fellowcitizens.

THE sea has its climates as well as the land. They both change with the latitude; but one varies with the elevation above, the other with the depression below, the sea level. The climates in each are regulated by circulation; but the regulators are, on the one hand, winds; on the other, currents.

The inhabitants of the ocean are as much the creatures of climate as are those of the dry land; for the same Almighty hand which decked the lily and cares for the sparrow, fashioned also the pearl and feeds the great whale, and adapted each to the physical conditions by which His providence has surrounded it. Whether of the land or the sea, the inhabitants are all His creatures, subjects of His laws, and agents in His economy. The sea, therefore, we may safely infer, has its offices and duties to perform; so may we infer, have its currents, and so, too, its inhabitants; consequently, he who undertakes to study its phenomena must cease to regard it as a waste of waters. He must look upon it as a part of that exquisite machinery by which the harmonies of nature are preserved, and then he will begin to perceive the developments of

order and the evidences of design; these make it a most beautiful and interesting subject for contemplation.

To one who has never studied the mechanism of a watch, its main-spring or the balance-wheel is a mere piece of metal. He may have looked at the face of the watch, and, while he admires the motion of its hands, and the time it keeps, or the tune it plays, he may have wondered in idle amazement as to the character of the machinery which is concealed within. Take it to pieces, and show him each part separately; he will recognize neither design, nor adaptation, nor relation between them; but put them together, set them to work, point out the offices of each spring, wheel, and cog, explain their movements, and then show him the result; now he perceives that it is all one design; that, notwithstanding the number of parts, their diverse forms and various offices, and the agents concerned, the whole piece is of one thought, the expression of one idea. He now rightly concludes that when the main-spring was fashioned and tempered, its relation to all the other parts must have been considered; that the cogs on this wheel are cut and regulated-adapted-to the rachets on that, etc.; and his final conclusion will be, that such a piece of mechanism could not have been produced by chance; for the adaptation of the parts is such as to show it to be according to design, and obedient to the will of one intelligence. So, too, when one looks out upon the face of this beautiful world, he may admire its lovely scenery, but his admiration can never grow into adoration unless he will take the trouble to look behind and study, in some of its details at least, the exquisite system of machinery by which such beautiful results are brought about. To him who does this, the sea, with its physical geography, becomes as the main-spring of a watch; its waters, and its currents, and its salts, and its inhabitants, with their adaptations, as balance-wheels, cogs and pinions, and jewels. Thus he perceives that they, too, are according to design; that they are the expression of One Thought, a unity with harmonies which One Intelligence, and One Intelligence alone, could utter. And when he has arrived at this point, then he feels that the study of the sea, in its physical aspect, is truly sublime. It elevates the mind and ennobles the man. The Gulf Stream is now no longer, therefore, to be regarded

by such an one merely as an immense current of warm water running across the ocean, but as a balance-wheel-a part of that grand machinery by which air and water are adapted to each other, and by which this earth itself is adapted to the well-being of its inhabitants-of the flora which decks, and the fauna which enlivens its surface.

Let us now consider the influence of the Gulf Stream upon the meteorology of the ocean.

To use a sailor expression, the Gulf Stream is the great "weather breeder" of the North Atlantic Ocean. The most furious gales of wind sweep along with it; and the fogs of Newfoundland, which so much endanger navigation in winter, doubtless owe their existence to the presence, in that cold sea, of immense volumes of warm water brought by the Gulf Stream. Sir Philip Brooke found the air on each side of it at the freezing point, while that of its waters was 80°. "The heavy, warm, damp air over the current produced great irregularities in his chronometers." The excess of heat daily brought into such a region by the waters of the Gulf Stream would, if suddenly stricken from them, be sufficient to make the column of superincumbent atmosphere hotter than melted iron.

With such an element of atmospherical disturbance in its bosom, we might expect storms of the most violent kind to accompany it in its course. Accordingly, the most terrific that rage on the ocean have been known to spend their fury within or near its borders.

Our nautical works tell us of a storm which forced this stream back to its sources, and piled up the water in the Gulf to the height of thirty feet. The Ledbury Snow attempted to ride it out. When it abated, she found herself high up on the dry land, and discovered that she had let go her anchor among the tree-tops on Elliott's Key. The Florida Keys were inundated many feet, and, it is said, the scene presented in the Gulf Stream was never surpassed in awful sublimity on the ocean. The water thus dammed up is said to have rushed out with wonderful velocity against the fury of the gale, producing a sea that beggared description. The “great hurricane" of 1780 commenced at Barbadoes. In it the bark was blown from the trees, and the fruits of the earth destroyed;

the very bottom and depths of the sea were uprooted, and the waves rose to such a height that forts and castles were washed away, and their great guns carried about in the air like chaff; houses were razed, ships were wrecked, and the bodies of men and beasts lifted up in the air and dashed to pieces in the storm. At the different islands, not less than twenty thousand persons lost their lives on shore, while farther to the north, the "Stirling Castle" and the "Dover Castle," men-ofwar, went down at sea, and fifty sail were driven on shore at the Bermudas.

Several years ago the British Admiralty set on foot inquiries as to the cause of the storms in certain parts of the Atlantic, which so often rage with disastrous effects to navigation. The result may be summed up in the conclusion to which the investigation led: that they are occasioned by the irregularity between the temperature of the Gulf Stream and of the neighboring regions, both in the air and water.

The habitual dampness of the climate of the British Islands, as well as the occasional dampness of that along the Atlantic coasts of the United States when easterly winds prevail, is attributable also to the Gulf Stream. These winds come to us loaded with vapors gathered from its warm and smoking waters. The Gulf Stream carries the temperature of summer, even in the dead of winter, as far north as the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.

One of the poles of maximum cold is, according to theory, situated in latitude 80° north, longitude 100° west. It is distant but little more than two thousand miles, in a northwestwardly direction, from the summer-heated waters of this stream. This proximity of extremes of greatest cold and summer heat will, as observations are multiplied and discussed, be probably found to have much to do with the storms that rage with such fury on the left side of the Gulf Stream.

I am not prepared to maintain that the Gulf Stream is really the "Storm King" of the Atlantic, which has power to control the march of every gale that is raised there; but the course of many gales has been traced from the place of their origin directly to the Gulf Stream. Gales that take their rise on the coast of Africa, and even as far down on that side as the parallel of 10° or 15° north latitude, have, it has been