63 



Science, which had been founded five or six years pre- 

 vious, was not composed of able scholars, but of a num- 

 ber of more or less talented contestants for honor and 

 fame, — of men who occupied a prominent yet disputed 

 position in a foreign and hostile country — young, hot- 

 headed Germans and Frenchmen who had not yet 

 achieved complete literary recognition. Such people 

 are stern and severe Judges. Bering was unfortunate 

 enough to fall into the hands of the German Gerhard 

 Fr. Mliller and the Frenchman Joseph Nicolas De FIsle. 

 Although Mliller had not yet seen Siberia, and 

 although it was not until ten years later that he suc- 

 ceeded in building that geographical card-house which 

 Captain Cook so noiselessly blew down, he nevertheless, 

 even at that time, on every occasion expressed the opin- 

 ion that Bering had not reached the northeast point 

 of Asia, and that his voyage had consequently not 

 accomplished its purpose. De l^Isle was Bering's intel- 

 lectual antipode. As a geographer he delighted in 

 moving about on the borderland of the world's unex- 

 plored regions. His element was that of vaguest con- 

 jecture, — the boldest combinations of known and 

 unknown ; and even as an old man he did not shrink 

 from the task of constructing, from insufficient accounts 

 of travels and apocryphal sailor-stories, a map of the 

 Pacific, of which not a single line has been retained. He 

 overstrained himself on the fame of his deceased brother, 

 whose methods, inclinations, and valuable geographical 

 collections he had inherited, but unfortunately not that 

 intuitive insight which made Guillaume De Tlsle the 



