OCEANOGRAPHY. 419 



has influenced in its turn numerous others and their applications. It 

 is the same in every stage of the intellectual improvement of humanity. 

 We realize with difficulty the momentum (giving to this word the mean- 

 ing usually assigned to it by physicists) of a new idea, which leads in 

 its train a veritable world and pushes another on before it. This is, 

 perhaps, the explanation of the difficulty with which a new idea over- 

 comes the opposition it meets from a crowd of people and things that 

 feel that after having lived they are about to disappear. Nothing 

 consents to die, and routine is only an instinct of preservation. 



Oceanography came in without noise. The human mind naturally 

 seeks causes for that which is seen, or to better recollect them after 

 they are discovered or even surmised, because of its very weakness it 

 hastens to deduce laws for them. The first navigators were not impelled 

 by curiosity which would have been incapable of fortifying their hearts 

 with the triple armor necessary for facing the sea; they were moved by 

 selfish interest and by want. The Phoenicians ventured upon the bine 

 waves of the Mediterranean to provide themselves with slaves and 

 metals to sell elsewhere and because it was impossible for them to live 

 confined on the narrow strip of land bounded by the chain of moun- 

 tains which separated them from hostile hordes. The Scandinavian 

 pirates, on their light " drakkars " with curved prows crowned with the 

 head of a dragon or bird of prey, fled through the rough waves and 

 tempests of the North Sea from a vast but unfruitful fatherland where 

 their time, which it was useless to spend in agriculture or in the tran- 

 quil arts of peace, was given up to social struggles, to perpetual combat, 

 to victories and, consequently, to defeats, after which the vanquished 

 was forced to submit to the vengeance or oppression of the vanquisher. 

 Thus, not many years ago, the Polynesian, driven by famine from his 

 island which had become too densely populated, flew in his pirogue 

 with high sails of matting over the great swell of the Pacific. To all 

 these voyagers the sea, despite its terrors, became a refuge. He who 

 feels himself separated only by a few planks from moving abysses, 

 where his gaze sees nolhing when, profiting by the hollows in the waves, 

 he tries to penetrate their depths, realizes that terrible forces too vast 

 to be conquered by any human power surround and rule him, and that 

 brute force avails nothing; it is necessary to call to his aid skill and 

 science. All sailors are scientists, some more so, some less, according 

 to their abilities, in order to elucidate the phenomena going on around 

 them, of which they would be the plaything if they did not set to work 

 in some measure to predict them in order to draw from them, first, 

 security and then profit. How useful it would be to know the probable 

 regions of calms and of storms, the strength and the direction of the 

 currents, and the mutual connection of the phenomena of the earth, the 

 heavens, and the waters, so that when one of them has been examined 

 the other may be foreseen, and if it is to be feared, conquered. The 

 more humanity advanced the more the sum of its known facts increased, 



