DIY Homeschooler

The Ocean of Air by Agnes Giberne is an interesting book from the late 1800s that explains natural phenomena related to air for young readers.

While subtitled Meteorology for Beginners, the book is hard to pigeonhole. The topics covered include:

• Elements of air.
• Oxygen.
• Carbon.
• Expiration.
• Atmosphere.
• Water vapor.
• Evaporation.
• Condensation.
• Dew, mist, and fog.
• Clouds.
• Rain, snow, and hail.
• Wind.
• Water circulation.
• Climate.
• Weather.
• Tornadoes.
• Thunder and lightning.
• Electricity.
• Magnetism.
• Heat.
• Light.
• Sound.
• Atoms.
• Molecules.
• The movement of molecules.
• Dust.
• Insects.
• Birds.

As you can see, we have a mixture of not only meteorology but also physics, chemistry, and biology!

But the title is accurate in that the subject is air — in all its forms, environments, and locations. A quick glance at the index will give you the idea.

From the Preface:

Heat and cold, the calm and the storm, thunder and lightning, vapour and cloud, and rain and dew, the passage of light and of sound, each and all of them in their turns, receive their share of illustration in the most pleasant of literary styles. Nor does the authoress hesitate to encounter the marvellous conflicts of the molecules constituting the phenomena of atmospheric pressure and of heat and light; while, in due course, she extends her flight to the regions of the Aurora and of the meteoric dust there floating and luminous, then gradually falling on the earth and on the wide surface of the ocean, and ultimately dredged up in the form of mineral nodules from the remotest depths of the Pacific. A pleasant diversion is then made to the flight of the birds of the air, and to the locusts which are driven onwards by its winds. It is by a fascination of this sort that the reader is, almost unconsciously to himself, led to a general conception of the plan and the forces of that part of the course of Nature amidst which he draws his breath and lives.

REV. C. PRITCHARD, D.D., F.R.S., ETC.
Savilian Professor of Astronomy in the University of Oxford

Agnes Giberne began writing children’s stories at a young age. Many of her stories were published by the Religious Tract Society.

But she is best remembered for her scientific works that sought to bring back the love of nature to those whose education prevented them from engaging their curiosity.

Again, from the Preface:

The education at our great public schools, and even at our Universities, is yearly becoming more technical, and is falling more and more under the domination of cram, and of the schedule, and of the syllabus, and of the examiner. The schoolboy is fast becoming hot pressed. He is urged, by considerations which he cannot resist, to maintain or extend the credit of his school, either by conventional distinction in Greek or Latin, or in what is miscalled natural science; or, if he be hopeless in these directions, he must, at all events, contribute to its fame by athletic feats. Thus his young life is marked out for him and trammeled within narrow limits, while the actual bent of his mind and the true reach of his natural capacity become ignored or unsatisfied….

As things are, his natural curiosity too often is stifled, that ‘forward-looking faculty,’ his imagination, becomes atrophied, and his mental endowments moulded into a stereotype.

Giberne was an amateur astronomer and part of the British Astronomical Society. Dr. Prichard was impressed enough with her work to write the Preface.

The writing is very engaging. A review in the 1890 Spectator put it this way:

This is a book which should please the young people as much as any scientific primer. Miss Giberne knows how to put her facts in an attractive form, and science should be made attractive, if it is to be of any use to boys or girls. It might be argued that, in a volume of this nature, physical laws cannot always be stated with mathematical accuracy. But whatever misleading impressions the youthful mind is likely to receive are quite compensated, we should say, by the creation of a real love of the subject. The letterpress and the beautiful illustrations of The Ocean of Air should have little difficulty in attaining this end.

For example (a random passage from the book):

At ten o’clock a storm raged, but without any unusual features: one of the ordinary cyclonic storms of the tropics.

But at the hour of midnight came an awful warning cry, passed on from man to man, and overtaken by the hurrying foe, ‘The water is on us!’

One cyclone-wave after another, drawn up at sea in the whirlwind centre, was launched ruthlessly by the fierce gale over the islands and the low-lying mainland. The rushing tide bore all before it. No less than three thousand square miles of country lay soon under water from ten to twenty feet at least in depth.

The Ocean of Air will make a wonderful read aloud to engage the interest of your children. Read a chapter and ask for oral narrations.

Older children can use the book as a spine for learning more about all of the topics covered.

Wonderful selection! And free.

Free eBook

• Online
• PDF
• EPUB (convert to Kindle)
• Audio (LibriVox)

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Additional Resources

The Starry Skies ~ Free eBook
Free public domain children’s book by the same author that simplifies astronomy concepts.