THE OCEAN AS THE RESERVOIR OF HEALTH 25 



conditions must have been entirely different and more 

 congenial to human life than they are now; and, 

 secondly, that nothing short of a cataclysm restoring 

 those conditions could again make those regions not 

 merely habitable, but capable of civilization again. 

 And this makes Russia's eager conquest of those 

 barren wastes the more pathetic in our eyes, and the 

 question more insistent, Why should she seek to 

 acquire these vast territories which can never be of 

 any material value to her ? 



It must not, however, be forgotten that this desert 

 condition of Middle Asia is due entirely to its remote- 

 ness from the sea. Of all lands with which we are 

 acquainted, not actually within the frigid zones, 

 Asiatic Russia suffers most for its inability to par- 

 ticipate in the blessings brought by the sea, and so it 

 serves as the great object-lesson in the value of the 

 sea to mankind. That magic loadstone which has ere 

 now caused some of the most inhospitable places of 

 the earth to become, for a time at least, the home of 

 a teeming population the discovery of gold can 

 hardly effect the same change in those terrible 

 regions, so remote are they from civilization, so 

 tremendous are the difficulties of transport, and so 

 severe are the vicissitudes of climate. 



But when we leave those arid, desolate regions and 

 come south, where the great open spaces of the sea 

 lave the shores of the huge peninsula of Hindostaii 

 and the coasts of Burmah and Siam, we see at once a 

 totally different order of things obtaining, especially 

 in India, where the influence of the ocean has made 

 this vast country one of the most fertile and densely 

 populated in the world. Its condition is in striking 



