REUNITED WITH HIS FAMILY IN ENGLAND 217 



"learned Doctors". The portion of this which intro- 

 duced Maury is as follows: "I present to you Matthew 

 Fontaine Maury, who while serving in the American Navy 

 did not permit the clear edge of his mind to be dulled, 

 or his ardor for study to be dissipated, by the variety of 

 his professional labors, or by his continual change of 

 place, but who, by the attentive observations of the 

 course of the winds, the climate, the currents of the seas 

 and oceans, acquired these materials for knowledge, 

 which afterwards in leisure, while he presided over the 

 Observatory at Washington, he systematized in charts 

 and in a book — charts which are now in the hands of all 

 seamen, and a book which has carried the fame of its 

 author into the most distant countries of the earth. 

 Nor is he merely a high authority in nautical science. 

 He is also a pattern of noble manners and good morals, 

 because in the guidance of his own life he has always 

 shown himself a brave and good man. When that cruel 

 Civil War in America was imminent, this man did not 

 hesitate to leave home and friends, a place of high honor 

 and an office singularly adapted to his genius — to throw 

 away, in one word, all the goods and gifts of fortune — 

 that he might defend and sustain the cause which seemed 

 to him the just one. 'The victorious cause pleased the 

 gods', and now perhaps, as victorious causes will do, 

 it pleases the majority of men, and yet no one can with- 

 hold his admiration from the man who, though num- 

 bered among the vanquished, held his faith pure and 

 unblemished even at the price of poverty and exile". 



Thus did England make amends for its former failure 

 to honor Maury before the Civil War when medals and 

 decorations were bestowed upon him by so many other 

 European governments. While in Cambridge, Maury 



