We here set out with the postulate that the sea, as well as the air, has its system of circulation, and that this system, whatever it be, and wherever its channels lie, whether in the waters at or below the surface, is in obedience to physical laws. The sea, by the circulation of its waters, doubtless has its offices to perform in the terrestrial economy; and when we see the currents in the ocean running hither and thither, we feel that they were not put in motion without a cause. On the contrary, we know they move in obedience to some law of Nature, be it recorded down in the depths below, never so far beyond the reach of human ken; and being a law of Nature, we know who gave it, and that neither chance nor accident had any thing to do with its enactment. Nature grants us all that this postulate demands, repeating it to us in many forms of expression; she utters it in the blade of green grass which she causes to grow in climates and soils made kind and genial by warmth and moisture that some current of the sea or air has conveyed far away from under a tropical sun. She murmurs it out in the cooling current of the north; the whales of the sea tell of it; and all its inhabitants proclaim it.

The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology, Chapter VIII, 370, Matthew Maury, 1855