(pa-sif'ik) that part of the sea lying between America, Asia, and Australia. It is known also as the South Sea. The name Pacific was given by Magellan, who entered from the stormy waters of Cape Horn in 1520 and found comparatively smooth sailing. It was first seen in 1513 by Balboa. The northern extremity is marked by Bering Strait. The southern boundary is fixed usually at the Antarctic Circle. It is divided by the equator into the North and the South Pacific. By some that part between the tropics is called the Central Pacific. The greatest breadth from east to west is more than 10,000 miles. The greatest known depth, found east of the island of Guam, is 31,614 feet. The bottom of the Pacific consists chiefly of red clays, ooze, and coral muds. Area, 70,000,000 square miles, greater than the entire land surface of the globe. The Pacific is the largest ocean and the deepest ocean. It contains one-half of the world's salt water. Owing to the nearness of the mountain ranges to its coast, it receives less water from rivers than is received by the Atlantic. The Pacific rivers of South America are all short mountain streams. It receives two large streams from North America,-the Columbia and the Yukon,-and three from Asia, the Amur, the Hoang-ho, and the Yangtse. The drainage basin of the Pacific is about half that of the Atlantic. For an account of the islands of the Pacific, the reader is referred to articles on GUAM, GALAPAGOS, NEW ZEALAND, PHILIPPINES, JAPAN, and FORMOSA. The tides of the Pacific rise from one to two feet in midocean. Along the coast of North America high tide rises usually ten feet. For reasons similar to those which govern the high tides of the Bay of Fundy, Cook's Inlet, Alaska, has a tide of twenty-eight feet. Tide rises in the pocket of Panama from thirteen to fifteen feet. The chief currents are the equatorial, flowing westward on either side of the equator at from a mile to a mile and a quarter an hour; the Japan, which passes up the eastern coast of Asia and down the western coast of North America, and a similar current in the Southern Pacific, known off South America as Humboldt's Current. The swiftest current in the ocean is that which passes Japan with a speed of thirty-one miles in twenty-four hours. See ATLANTIC; ARCTIC; ANTARCTIC.