Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/545

Rh the society as a basis for the use of the membership in the arrangement of their beneficial system. As this table has never, so far as I know, been published outside the society's own journals, I submit it here, with the expectation of life, according to the American tables:



T has been said that, without the sea, civilization could not have been developed, and the world would have continued barbarous. That element, from the primitive times of mankind, has brought together the peoples of the most distant countries, and inspired the ancients with the idea of the Infinite. Homer believed in a river Oceanus; the Hindoo mythologians in a liquid expanse, boundless as space. The fishermen who set their rude nets in the creeks of the Cyclades were, perhaps, the first naturalists, and the Phoenician sailors may have been the first marine engineers. In our own time, all the sciences find in the ocean either a limitless field of exploration, or an enemy to be conquered. Zoologists, closeted in their laboratories, endeavor to determine the beings which the dredge has brought up from frightful depths, while hydrographers and constructors study the currents, raise jetties, and excavate ports. The public visit the aquariums, admire the dikes and excavations, and applaud what they see, but do not see all. Our purpose is to explain the researches of the 