They are the two currents that issue from the Gulf of Mexico and the Java Sea.

Their enormous liquid masses, fleeing ceaselessly from the equator, govern a vast assemblage of water from the poles that comes to occupy their space, and these chilled and fresher currents are constantly precipitating themselves on the electric hearth of the equator that warms and salts them anew, renewing with its systole and diastole the life of the world.

The ocean struggles vainly to condense these two warm currents without ever succeeding in mingling itself with them.
They are torrents of a deep blue, almost black, that flow across the cold and green waters.
The Atlantic current, upon reaching Newfoundland, divides its arms, sending one of them to the North Pole.

With the other, weak and exhausted by its long journey, it modifies the temperature of the British Isles, tempering refreshingly the coasts of Norway.

The Indian current that the Japanese call, because of its color, "the black river," circulates between the islands, maintaining for a longer time than the other its prodigious powers of creation and agitation which enable it to trail over the planet an enormous tail of life.
Its center is the apogee of terrestrial energy in the vegetable and animal creations, in monsters and in fish.