OCEANOGRAPHY. 423 



high over the thick undergrowth and the vast shades at whose feet the 

 sleepy waves broke softly on the sandy beach of a desert isle; we 

 looked out into the somber depths of starry nights. These were the 

 feasts of thought. Over the open page of an atlas we dreamed, trav- 

 ersing the seas from the Tropics to the Poles, braving tempests and 

 eternal ice, gathering incalculable treasures of poetic, thought, the con- 

 solation and often the strength of our mature age, which, after many 

 years, dissipated, scattered in light smoke by the wind of the tempests 

 of life, terrible and implacable as those of the ocean, reduced to no 

 more than the humble denier, the widow's mite, remain still the joy 

 and blessing of old age, which advances upon us with giant strides. 



Just as the thirst for discoveries was assuaged because there was 

 nothing more to discover, the thirst for natural curiosities diminished 

 and in its turn disappeared. Many grew tired of being enthusiastic, 

 of admiring, when they thought that they had seen everything; they 

 grew more tired yet of cataloguing. Moreover, it was necessary to 

 make other use of the riches acquired than giving a name to each 

 object, placing samples of minerals in glass cases or cellars, samples of 

 plants between sheets of paper in a herbarium, stuffing animals and 

 setting them in line in a galley. Ideas became more serious; poetry 

 and fancy gave way to science, which is in itself poetry and fancy. 

 The intelligence of a man, following its natural bent, wished now to 

 group the accumulation of facts in his possession under hypothetical 

 laws, and he went to nature to verify the hypotheses suggested in his 

 laboratory. Cook observed — that is to say, measured — the transit of 

 Venus; Dnmont d'Urville sought the southern magnetic pole; Sabine 

 and Sir John Franklin went for the same purpose to the arctic regions. 

 We gathered no more at random; we advanced toward a definite end. 



Little by little, aided by the progress of chemistry and physics, the 

 need of exactitude is making itself felt everywhere. We are applying 

 it to oceanography. Realizing that it is indispensable to measure, we 

 are no longer content to describe. We invent instruments, make chem- 

 ical analyses, record figures, which are condensed facts, and true 

 science, methodical and useful, is being evolved. At the head of each 

 chapter on oceanography is found the name of a man of genius or of 

 talent and an instrument. The currents of the sea have Franklin aud 

 the thermometer; the topography and lithology of submarine depths 

 have Buache with his isobathic charts, Brooke and his detachable sound- 

 ing lead, Delesse and his lithological charts; the chemistry of the sea 

 has Forchhammer and his analyses ; thermatics has Miller-Casella, then 

 Negretti and Zambra with their differential thermometer; optics has 

 Berard with his porcelain plate, which shortly after becomes the disk of 

 Secchi; physics, the mechanism of the waves, has Aime with his mer- 

 cury gage and the ball apparatus which he tested in the roadstead of 

 Algiers, and the Weber brothers with their trough. All data are now 

 reduced to graphical form constantly improved to approach nearer and 



