California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences, Volume 13, Number 4, 2 March 1860 — The Gulf Stream as a Fertilizing Agent. [ARTICLE]

The Gulf Stream as a Fertilizing Agent.

If we follow the Gulf Stream across the Ocean, we perceive how fully it fulfills the purposes for which it was designed. Sir Walter Scott tells us that tho pools in the Orkneys are never frozen, the effect of the graud hot-water-warming apparatus of a fur distant shore being seusibly felt even in these islands, which are situated in a latitude nearly ten degrees further north than the icebound const of Labrador. We all know that in Great Britain there is an extraordinary difference between the eastern and the western coasts; so great indeed as to induce completely different degrees of agriculture. The Kmerald Isle owes her splendid grazing land to the soR west breezes born of the Gulf Stream which strikes full upon her shores. The western shores of England ure robed in bright green pasture, nourished with the warmth and moisture issuing from the same tropical sun. The dairy produce of Great Britain has its roots and issues in this steadfast hut water river in the Ocean, the limit of which modern science has so accurately mapped: nay, the florid lamb looks of our people and the large size of our domestic animals, are but the effects of that moist and genial atmosphere which finds its birthplace in the beneficent Gulf Stream. And in order to bring the effects of this extraordinary marine phenomena closer home to the stomach of our reader, we may perhaps be permitted to ask him, how it is that of late years he has purchased peas, potatoes and broroli so many weeks before their season in Coveut Garden market. Peas in May were once thought to be an extravagance only allowable to a dake. Now any moderate man may indulge in them to bis heart's content. Well, these vegetables are forced, but in a hot-house atmosphere of nature's own contriving. Where the tail of the British dolphtn dips iuto the Atlantic, there the effects of the Gulf stream are most felt, it is bathed with the warm moist air, heated by the far-off-Gulf cauldron, and we may say, with exactness, that the majority of our early vegetable! told In the open market are forced in hothouses in Cornwall and Portugal, the seaboard of the more southerly promontory, by means of a boiler situated beyond the West Indian Archipelago, the conducting hot-water pipe of which runs for nearly four thousand miles between the cold walls of the surrounding ocean. Had the ancients been aware of tbit property of the ocean, it would have modified the representation! of the Pagan Olympus, and we should have been familiar with the spectacle of—Neptune turned gar' «er.