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.
That connection and communication are especially visible with the Sun and Moon; the latter, though the servant of earth, has none the less power over her. As the flowers of the earth turn their heads sunward, so does the flower-bearing earth aspire towards him. In her most movable portion, her immense fluid mass, she raises herself and gives visible token of feeling his attraction. She rises as far as she can and swelling her bosom twice a day gives, at least, a sigh to the friendly stars.
Does not our earth feel the attraction of yet other globes? Are her tides ruled only by the sun and moon? All the learned world say it, all seamen believe it; thence terrible errors resulting in shipwrecks. At the dangerous shallows of Saint Malo the error amounted to eighteen feet. It was in 1839 that Chazallan, who nearly lost his life through these errors, began to discover and calculate the secondary, but considerable undulations which, under various influences, modify the general tide. Stars less dominant than the sun and moon have, doubtless, their share in producing the alternate rise and fall of the waters of our globe. But under what law do they produce this effect? Chazallan tells us;—"the undulation of the tide in a port follows the law of vibrating chords." A serious and suggestive sentence, that, which leads us to comprehend that the mutual relations of the stars are the mathematical relations of the celestial music, as antiquity affirmed.
The earth, by great and secondary tides, speaks to the planets, her sisters. Do they reply to her? We must think so. From their fluid elements they also must rise, sensible to the rise of the waters of the earth. The mutual attraction, the tendency of each star to emerge from egotism, must cause sublime dialogues to be heard in the skies. Unfortunately the human ear can hear but the least part of them. There is another point to be considered. It is not at the very moment of the passing of the influential planet that the sea yields to its influence. She is in no such servile haste to obey; she must have time to feel and obey the attraction. She has to call the idle waters to herself, to vanquish their inert force, to attract, to draw to her the most distant. The rotation of the world, too, so terribly rapid, is incessantly displacing the points subjected to the attractive power. To this we must add that the great army of waves in its combined motion has to encounter all the opposition of natural obstacles—islands, capes, straits, the various curvings of shores, and the no less potent obstacles of winds, currents, and the rapid descent of mountain torrents, swelled by the melted snows;—these, and a thousand other unforseen accidents occur, to alter the regular movement into terrible strife. The ocean yields not. The display of strength which is made by broad and swift rivers cannot intimidate him. The waters, that the rivers pour down upon him, he heaps them up into mountainous masses and drives them back so violently that he seems bent on forcing them to the summits of the mountains from whence they have descended.
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