THE SEA IN THE LIFE OF THE NATIONS. 391 



by the construction of dums and canals on the lower Iloangho, in 

 Babylonia, and on the Egyptian Nile. 



Incomparably more important, however, seems that decisive act of 

 prehistoric man, when, conquering- his terror of the unknown, he 

 boldlv trusted himself to the hostile element, and fared over the 

 surging limitless waters on a fragile raft, or in a rude dugout, or in 

 a boat of roughly joined plaid<s. This progressive act, containing 

 the germ of man's dominion over the earth, may have been independ- 

 ently executed on more than one occasion, when the various hordes, 

 strangers to one another, into which our race had long been split by 

 extended wanderings, arrived at the shores of the ocean. Where 

 streams empty into the ocean, the attempt to reach the high seas 

 might be made in river boats. Elsewhere, the impulse to move upon 

 the sea for a longer time than swinnning permits led directly to the 

 art of building and guiding ships, the art which, in its wonderful state 

 of development, enables man, alone among all creatures, to f)verstep 

 the limits of the coast line on all sides and reach the most distant 

 points. 



But what could possibly have impelled man to this reckless venture 

 on the ocean!' Hunger, that stern and omnipotent educator of man- 

 kind, was probably a fi'equent motive, as may be surmised from the 

 custom of the Chauci to hunt for tish in the ebb tide. Again, in flight 

 before a superior hostile tribe, fear may often have made man invent- 

 ive, and led him to prefer the deceptive sea as a temporarv refuge to 

 the sure fate at the hands of the enemy. If a tribe took up its per- 

 manent abode at the seacoast, two causes may have operated to educate 

 man to gradual confidence in the once dreaded element: First, the value 

 of the animals abounding in the waters along the coast; second, the 

 allurements of an opposite shore. These causes may have operated 

 separately or together. The lack of food stuffs in the polar lands 

 would never have tempted the Eskimos to push ])eyond the eightieth 

 degree of latitude. This was effected by the promise of food held out 

 by the teeming animal life of the Arctic Sea; in fact, it was the capture 

 of seals that led these stout-hearted inhabitants of polar lands to cross 

 the icy American straits, and penetrate to the most northern point ever 

 inhabited by man, making of them such unexcelled masters in the 

 handling of kayaks that a skillful, hardy Eskimo can paddle his l)oat 

 from Kiigen to Copenhagen in one day. The colonization of the Hel- 

 lenes progressed from the ^gean Sea, along the shores of the Black 

 Sea, toward the course taken by the tunny in its wanderings, just as the 

 colonization of their nautical masters, the Phcenicians, extended to 

 various places on the shores of the Mediterranean, inffuenced b}" the 

 presence of the shellfish from which they got their purple dye. In 

 districts where the interior is forbidding (which is the case not only in 

 the polar regions) through the bareness of sheer rock, the bleakness 



