Morning journal and courier., 1888-09-01

A&S0A&kADe
 ANNAPoL1s, Nova Scotia, August 27.
 To the Editor of the JOURNAL AND COURIER:
 All my life have been interested and cu- rious regarding tides, and being well equipped for a little investigation of my own, determined to know as much as l could about the much -talked-of-tides in the Bay of Fundy. Constantly referring to this subject with tho hope that I might luckily hit upon some chance information-though I have long since learned that one gets the least knowledge of the sea from sea-faring men-good Captain Ballast and long bodied, long-sufering Tom became much wrought up about the matter. Tom suffered in general way because the subject was worry ing us all and could not be settled. He "sorter hated, i" he insisted with much feel ing, "to have any ship come to these ar docks as couldn't be knocked together and la'nched." The captain had deeper sor- row with personal grievance in it. The idea that any land-lubber could come into these waters and know anything about any thing hurt him. s'Taint so much tides in pertickler an gen'ral," he would remark with two or three savage grinds of his lar- board cud of tobacco, broad an long, 'n' neither m upper. It's jess the pint as lef' my di'ry to hum. Dearl dsarl Jess to think of my negl'genceI Why, that ar drry's got the tide bisniss ter sech bounds inter it as makes my wife almost Heard haYin' 1t north O Quoddy Headl"
 A good deal after the manner of the eva sive policy of willy Captain Ballast, the sci entists have chiefly left their diaries at home. Read all you may, and there is little even of this sort to be found. You have simply two things to confess. These are that you have not been one whit enlightened; and the scientists have never yet brought forward rational reasons for the strange and mighty action of the ocean currents and coast tides st particular places. The moon does this; the sun does that; the rotation of the earth does some other thing; and while they have revealed 8 good reason, tor want of a better reason for alongshore regularity of general tide action, they have not fath> omed, or they cannot tell, any satisfying cause for such tremendous phenomena as oe- cur right here, and in Bristol channel, Eng land, where thousand estuaries and bays exist, when, according to their logic, equally majestic movements of the sea landward should occur. Nor have they stated these phenomena correctly. The Bristol channel tides are said by these men to rise 'ffrom forty to fifty feet" That is not true. I have repeatedly witnessed the ebb and flow of the Bristol channel tide at Avon-mouth, just below Bristol, where the tide reaches the highest elevation. Its greatest difference between regular low and high water is thirty seven feet. When great storms have come across St. Georges channel from the west with the tide 1t has reached thirty-nine feet. That is enough. So too in all old and new geographies from which you and I were taught, and in the encyclopedias, it is af-
 irmed that the tide swells from eighteen feet, at the entrance of the Bay of Fundy, to the enormous height of sixty feet, and even to seventy feet in the highest spring tides.n This statement of science is more glaringly false than the former. No tide nor even tidal wave ever rose in the Bay of Fun dy to height of seventy feet. It is possi- ble that the great "Saxby tiden of 1869, as 1t is called by all Fundy, waterside folk, rose fifty feet above lowest known low water. That is the highest tide ever known on these shores, notwithstanding the book authorities. In our weeks cruising around the Bay of Fundy's shores, in which we encountered neither wonderful fog nor the yaunted ter rible seas of this region, some singular tides statistics were secured. At Eastport the ay- craze highest tide rises twenty-four feet; al | St. John, thirty feet; at St. Martha, Salmon river and Salisbury cove, twenty-nine feet near Moneton, at point just below tho head of the Chapody bay, thirty-eight feet ! at the head of Cumberland bay, the north eastmost estuary of Fundy, forty-one fset;- ! the highest single tide-spot on the bay. Re | turning to the southern waters, the sverag, rise at points in the great sEd romantic basiE ' of Minas, an eastern arm of Fundy and tht
 heart of the old Acadian region, was found to be twenty-nine feet. All along the south I ern shore, formed by the north coast O
 Nova Scotia, the tide-height gradually de ereases; until at Annapolis it is but twenty \ four feet; at St. Mary's bay, still nearer th, ocean, 1t is but eighteen feet; while abou the Island of Grand Manan, which set \ squarely in the mouth of Fundy, the yea through it will not average higher that a | Boston, New York or Baltimore
 | This is all important from the fact that i l explodes nearly three centuries colossal ex \ aggeration regarding matter that is sufi 1 ciently wonderful if the simple truth bl \ told. For it is Q consciousness of infinite magnitude in itself that the sea. twice eacl day, 6lls an area equalling six thousand square miles with mass of water perhap averaging thirty feet in depth, piled square | Iy upon the immeasurable volume alread, existing there since the sea was made. 1
 also demonstrates plain and simple reasol for an apparent marvel. The authorities ga, II that "the Bay of Fundy opens it's bosom t, receive the great Atlantic tide-waye," whicl
 forever moves east to west opposite the di rection of the earths' revolution. An.
 achool-boy, on looking at his map, could tel