A WONDERER UNDER SEA 5 



of home, food, enemies, family, and neighborhood. From 

 this time on it was neighborhood that received occasional 

 radical additions. The rest was more or less relative ad- 

 vances in degree — cave to palace, beetles to pate, bears to 

 big Berthas, mate to — well, mate. But when a hitherto 

 impenetrable portion of the earth or some zone foreign 

 to human presence is suddenly rendered accessible by 

 reason of a new means of transport or the overcoming of 

 some elemental or other natural condition inimical to 

 human life, then every corner of man's mind susceptible 

 to enthusiasm or accumulated curiosity is aroused to 

 highest pitch. 



The First Wonderer began timidly to creep, and to 

 know that he was creeping, farther and farther from the 

 home cave, out over the flat earth, until finally Columbus 

 and Magellan sank below the horizon, the latter to re- 

 appear on the other side. Next to our race coming to con- 

 sciousness and beginning to know that it knew, these men 

 probably contributed more to enthusiasm and curiosity 

 than any others before them. 



Passing swiftly on through the centuries in our search 

 for radical extensions of environment, we come across 

 flurries of excitement when someone first crossed Africa 

 from coast to coast, or others reached the poles, but we 

 pass these by and seize upon the airplane. In modern times 

 the invention and development of this means of transport 

 mark the most spectacular invasion of a new field of 

 activity; only with this very phrase the terrestrial domi- 



