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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, January 28, 1868

The Basin of the Atlantic Ocean.

The basin of the Atlantic Ocean is a long trough, separating the Old World from the New, and extending probably from pole to pole. This ocean furrow was probably scooped into the solid crust of our planet by the Almighty hand, that there the waters which he called seas might be gathered together, so as to let the dry land appear, and fit the earth for the habitation of man.

From the top of Chimborazo to the bottom of the Atlantic, at the deepest place yet reached by the plummet in the northern Atlantic, the distance in a vertical line is ten miles. Could the waters of the Atlantic be drawn off, so as to expose to view this great gash, which separates continents and extends from the Arctic to the Antarctic, it would present a scene most rugged, grand, and imposing.

The very ribs of the solid earth, with the foundations of the sea, would be brought to light, and we should have presented to us at one view, in the empty cradle of the ocean, a thousand fearful wrecks, with that fearful array of dead men's skulls, great anchors, heaps of pearls and inestimable stones, which, in the poet's eye, lie scattered in the bottom of the sea, making it hideous with sights of ugly death.

The deepest part of the North Atlantic is somewhere between the Bermudas and the Grand Banks. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico are held in a basin, about a mile deep in the deepest part. There is at the bottom of the sea, between Cape Rice in Newfoundland and Cape Clear in Ireland, a remarkable steppe, which is already known as the telegraphic plateau.