The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1855-08-28 00:00:00

SUPPLEMENT TO THE LIVERPOOL STAN

OCEAN : THE CHANGEFUL AND THE
PERMANENT IN NATURE.

THE ocean, the same now as in creation's dawn,
is yet never the same from moment to moment ;
still less from day to day. Its waters are mo-
mently, hourly, daily ascending into the sky as
vapour, at the rate of some hundreds of cubic
miles a-day, to be returned in the shape of rain
or snow, either directly on the sea, or by a long
circuit through springs and lakes, and rivers,
glaciers, and icebergs. They are, moreover, kept
in perpetual motion, not merely by the action of
the wind rippling or agitating their surface, but
by vast never-ending streams and currents com-
municating to them as regular a system of circu-
lation as is given to the blood of our own bodies.
The waters that bathe our own shores to-day are
not those which washed them yesterday, or will
wash them to-morrow : they have come to us
from the West Indies, and are on their way to
the shores of Norway and the Arctic Sea. They
bring us occasionally fragments of tropical pro-
ductions, and it is said even that, before the time
of Columbus, bodies of West Indian savages had
been cast ashore on the coasts of Ireland. The
waters that sweep along the eastern shores of
North America travel from Baffin's Bay, and
bring down with them great floating icebergs
from those northern rep:ons. What is true of
the waters of the opposifb shores of the North
Atlantic is true also, with modifications, although
it may not be so well known, of every other shore,
of every other ocean in the world. The quasi-
eternity, the very unchangeableness of nature is
produced, not by immobility and stagnation, but
by never-ending changes, and by never-ceasing
motions—all so admirably arranged as exactly to
balance and. compensate each other, and to com-
bine, by means of the very play of apparently
antagonistic forces, all the variety of life with
perfect constancy of state. The whole solar
system, the very universe itself, is constantly
changing ; everybody in it exerts and feels an
hourly varying influence on and from all the rest,
so that they are kept always vibrating and quiver-
ing about their mean or legitimate paths, but in
such a way that every perturbation on the one
side is ultimately exactly balanced by an equal
disturbance on the other ; and, after some almost
inconceivable lapse of time, every star and every
satellite, having passed through " cycle and
epicycle, orb in orb," returns to precisely the
same relative position they had once held before.
What is true of the motions and circulation of
the heavenly bodies is true also of the drops of
water that compose the ocean. They pass from
one part of the sea to another, and follow through
current after current round about the globe, till
they come again to the same spot. They rise
from the sea into the sky, becoming successively
vapour, cloud, rain, hail, or snow ; and, after
spending perhaps ages on the mountain top, or
in the bowels of the earth, they run down again
as rivers into the sea. A time must come when
all the widely-separated drops re-adjust themselves
into the relative positions they once held before.
Contemplating these ceaseless changes, and their
resulting uniformity, which require for their
evolution time, that seems to stretch into eternity,
listening as it were to the perpetual beating of the
great heart of nature, and feeling with reverent
hand the pulses of her life, the philosopher learns
at once humility from a sense of his own indi-
vidual littleness, and hope, and confidence, and
courage, from a consciousness that he also has a
place in the universe, and that nothing that
exists is ever lost, wasted, or thrown aside. " I
think, therefore I am," he extends into " I am,
therefore I shall be."

LITERARY EXTRACTS.

A NICE SUMMER DRlNK.—Before my departure
from Macon, I supped in the large room of the hotel.
I had frequently observed the singular mixtures which
many of the Americans make at their meals : I here
observed that a gentleman, after calling for a glass of
milk, deliberately shook a portion of the contents of
the pepper-box into it, and, having added a teaspoon-
ful of salt, stirred the whole together, and drank it.
There is certainly no accounting for taste ; but this,
among all the strange compounds which I met with
in the United States, was the most extraordinary.---
Col. Cunynghame' s Glimpse at the Western Republic.

FEEDING ON WATER-CRESS.—OFFERS OF STONES
FOR FOOD.—We halted at the khan of Episkopi, close
to a little stream full of capital water-tresses, which I
began to gather and eat with some bread and cheese,
an act which provoked the Epirote bystanders of the
village to extatic laughter and curiosity. Every por-
tion I put into my mouth delighted them as a most
charming exhibition of foreign whim ; and the more
juvenile spectators instantly commenced bringing me
all sorts of funny objects, with an earnest request that
the Frank would amuse them by feeding thereupon
forthwith. One brought a thistle, a second a collec-
tion of sticks and wood, a third some grass ; a fourth
presented me with a fat grasshopper : the whole scene
was acted amid shouts of laughter, in which I joined
as loudly as any. We parted amazingly good friends
and the wits of Episkopi will long remember the
Frank who fed on weeds out of the water.—Lear's
Journals of' a Landscape Painter in Albania, 4.c.
WAX AND HONEY.—Wax-lights, though we are
accustomed to overlook the fact, and rank them with
ordinary common-places, are true fairy tapers---a white
metamorphosis from the flowers, crowned with the
most intangible of all visible mysteries---fire. Then
there is honey, which a Greek poet would have called
the sister of wax---a thing as beautiful to eat as the
other is to look upon ; and beautiful to look upon too.
What two extraordinary substances to be made, by
little winged creatures, out of roses and lilies ! What
a singular and lovely energy in nature to impel those
little creatures thus to fetch out the sweet and elegant
properties of the coloured fragrances of the gardens,
and serve them to us for food and light !---honey to
eat, and waxen tapers to eat by ! What more graceful
repast could be imagined on one of the fairy tables
made by Vulcan, which moved of their own accord,
and came gliding, when he wanted a luncheon, to the
side of Apollo !---the honey golden as his lyre, and the
wax fair as his shoulders. Depend upon it he has
eaten of it many a time, chatting with Hebe before
some Olympian concert ; and as he talked in an under-
tone, fervid as the bees, the bass strings of his lyre
murmured an accompaniment—Leigh Hunt.
POPULARITY OF FINE TERMS.—Every man has
his hobby of magniloquent mystification ; for instance,
what surgeon would announce to a jury that his
patient had received a black eye, and would not rather
describe the injury as a hypopium, developing much
sanguineous extravasation about the ophthalmic epi-
dermis ? What young gardener, newly promoted
from a hedgerow, would sacrifice his position by call-
a dandelion other than by the botanical term
" leontodon," to the stupefaction of nursemaids and
the perplexity of schoolboys ? Indeed, as to botany,
the " rabies verborum" has so spread as to induce a
doubt' whether if Solomon himself, who " spake of "
that science, from the hyssop on the wall to the cedar
which grew upon Lebanon, had walked arm-in-arm
through the Crystal Palace with norroy-king-of-
arms, during the late exhibition, both would not have
been considerably at a nonplus to recognize the hum-
ble families of honeysuckle and Clarke under the
hybrid association—plant and man upon one stalk—
cassifolium polycotydonum Clarkii ? Imagine these
ancient worthies, or the progenitors of the said Mr.
Clarke, gazing upon this singular production, identify-
ing their descendant. Doubtless they would conceive
that in the changes which had passed over the world
since their time, humanity had reverted to its pristine
muck, and was just again putting forth its embryo
vitality in the shape of vegetation as its first stage, so
that the botanist should absolutely be represented by
a rhododendron, the astronomer by a sunflower—stay,
we are wrong, an helianthus—an ancient spinster by
a sensitive-plant, or mimosa pudica, and the areca, or
cabbage-tree, embrace with its parental petals the