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, traversing the seas from the Tropics to the Poles, braving tempests and eternal ice, gathering incalculable treasures of poetic, thought, the consolation 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; Dumont 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 chemical 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 and the thermometer; the topography and lithology of submarine depths have Buache with his isobathic charts, Brooke and his detachable sounding 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 Bérard with his porcelain plate, which shortly after becomes the disk of Secchi; physics, the mechanism of the waves, has Aimé with his mercury 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
