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Here he runs counter to two of the best-established laws of terrestrial climatology the wonderful equalising effects of warm ocean-currents which are the chief agents in diminishing polar cold; the equally striking effects of warm moist winds derived from these oceans, and the great storehouse of heat we possess in our vapour-laden atmosphere, its vapour being primarily derived from these same oceans!
De Candolle, Darwin and most of the European writers claim that the dispersal was by natural agencies, such as ocean-currents. They point out that the fibrous rind or husk would keep the fruits afloat, and uninjured, for many days or even many weeks, while being carried from one country to another in a manner that would explain their geographic distribution.
So also it is the heat-waves which make the air hot and light, and so cause it to rise and make winds and air-currents, and these again give rise to ocean-currents. It is these dark rays, again, which strike upon the land and give it the warmth which enables plants to grow.
The little American's sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt, harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, but it had been favoured above all by the simple spring-board of the scene, by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock, gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean-currents.
That the growth of the continents owes much to the denudation of the sea-bottom, brought about by the tides and the ocean-currents, which were probably much more powerful in early than in late geologic times, and to submarine mineral springs and volcanic eruptions of ashes and mud, admits of little doubt.
When, during the height of the Glacial period, the ocean-currents were widely different to what they now are, some of the inhabitants of the temperate seas might have reached the equator; of these a few would perhaps at once be able to migrate southwards, by keeping to the cooler currents, while others might remain and survive in the colder depths until the southern hemisphere was in its turn subjected to a glacial climate and permitted their further progress; in nearly the same manner as, according to Forbes, isolated spaces inhabited by Arctic productions exist to the present day in the deeper parts of the northern temperate seas.
Imagine now that the processes above indicated, continue that the emerging lands become wider in extent, and fringed by higher and more varied shores; and that there still go on those ocean-currents which, at long intervals, convey from far distant shores immigrant forms of life. What will result?
He would also observe very curious things going on in our air- ocean; he would see large streams and currents of air, which we call winds, and which would appear to him as ocean-currents do to us, while near down to the earth he would see thick mists forming and then disappearing again, and these would be our clouds.
I know of nothing more wild than that gray waste of boulders; it is a natural Salisbury Plain, of which icebergs and ocean-currents were the Druidic builders; in that multitude of couchant monsters there seems a sense of suspended life; you feel as if they must speak and answer to each other in the silent nights, but by day only the wandering sea-birds seek them, on their way across the Cape, and the sweet-bay and green fern embed them in a softer and deeper setting as the years go by.
Professor Gray may insist that such a phenomenon as this requires belief in the supernatural, and that migration by ocean-currents is the more rational theory of the two.
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