Page:Smithsonian Report (1898).djvu/501

Rh 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 meaning 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 overcomes 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 Phœnicians ventured upon the blue 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 mountains 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 tranquil 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 nothing 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,