6 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



days, in storm and calm, these averaged one to 

 every square hundred yards. So my Sargasso Sea 

 failed, in the aggregate, to materialize and I con- 

 tented myself with the thousand and one other in- 

 terests and problems which always rush in to fill 

 such a vacuum. 



When, in the very heart of the sea, I found only 

 small heads or mats of weed I should have been 

 truly desolate were it not that the explanation was 

 of exceedingly great interest. It made the Sar- 

 gasso Sea more familiar, less sinister; it showed 

 that even in this shifting, plastic, nomadic, open- 

 work island there were definite seasons. An eternal 

 spring or autumn or winter is a frightful thing to 

 contemplate, while a succession of seasons links the 

 very antipodes with our home backyard. Dunsany 

 well knew how to destroy an alien feeling — to con- 

 nect the extremes of geologic ages — when he be- 

 gan a tale with the sentence, "It was a cold winter's 

 evening late in the Stone Age." 



And so this region lost much of its inimical char- 

 acter when I realized that I could say of my visit, 

 "It was a late autumn day in the Sargasso Sea." 

 My experience demonstrated an incisive difference 

 between an undertaking dealing with business, re- 

 ligion or politics on one hand, and science on the 

 other. We had set out to find vast fields of the 

 weed teeming with living creatures, and we found 

 only small mats and plaques almost destitute of 

 life. A negative result such as this would be ac- 

 counted a failure in business or hopeless in religion. 

 To science it was of concrete value and added a 



