interests of commerce, besides being gains to
exact science. The rapid expansion both of
commerce and knowledge for which we
have in these days reason to look, will
produce in the next generation higher and more
numerous demands than ever on the energies
of the merchant officer; the sea will become
in a greater degree than it ever has been, the
highway of nations; and the sailor's vocation
will become one of the noblest in the world.

How much the sailor has to learn and
teach, Lieutenant Maury, we think, was the
first to show, arid to cause to be felt in an
effective way. We doubt whether any seaman
hitherto has done so much as this gentleman
for the real elevation of his calling among all
nations and in every kind of service. He
belongs to the American navy, but he seeks
cordial co-operation with all merchant officers.

There is the sea, he says in effect, covering
three-fourths of the surface of the globe, the
widest field for discovery and observation
that this planet offers. There is the
atmosphere over earth and sea; the sailor has
three-fourths of the whole human power of
investigating that. More than three-fourths,
for the sailor's atmosphere is found always
subject only to its own uncomplicated laws;
its winds blow over a vast plain of water,
offering them no such hindrance, forcing them
into no such shifts as they are put to in
passing over land, where they are vexed by
mountain-tops, valleys, plains, woods, lakes
and rivers, that all meddle with the
movement of the air. By applying to their use
the secrets of the air and water, ships travel
from shore to shore. The better they know
such secrets—and more than half of them
still remain unrevealed—with the greater
safety, certainty, and speed will the ships
travel. The sailor has only to carry with
him proper instruments, a mind instructed
to observe, and an accurate and punctual
habit of note-taking, to become not merely a
promoter of the interests of his own calling—
though he is that in the first place—but also
a benefactor to all kinds of men. The
observation that may mean little when taken by
itself, has only to be placed in the hands of
an instructed hydrographer, or meteorologist,
who has at the same time laid before him
the contemporary records of observations
made by other sailors at different points
of the surface of the sea, and truths
of the grandest kind are confirmed or
elicited. Whom does it not concern to
understand exactly, as only sailors can enable us
to understand, the laws that regulate certain
conditions of the atmosphere? We call
weather capricious, only because we are not
yet clever enough to penetrate its mysteries.
Moist winds, essential to the growth of
plants, all. blow from the sea; the
cultivators of the vine and olive may be helped
by the same knowledge that is collected for
the service of the mariner; the husbandman,
the merchant, statesman, and philosopher,
all look for most important aid from
the learning that is developed and acquired
at sea.

To the mind of the learned sailor,
everything will bring knowledge. "The wind and
rain," here we quote Lieutenant Maury's
own words, in the preface to his Sailing
.Directions, "the wind and rain; the vapour
and the cloud; the tide, the current, the
saltness and depth, and temperature and
colour of the sea; the shade of the sky;
the temperature of the air; the tint and
shape of the clouds; the height of the tree
on the shore, the size of the leaves, the
brilliancy of the flowers; each and all may be
regarded as the exponent of certain physical
combinations, and, therefore, as the expression
in which Nature chooses to announce
her own meaning; or, if we please, the
language in which she writes down the operation
of her own laws. To understand that
language, and to interpret aright those laws,
is the object of the undertaking which those
who co-operate with me have in hand. No
fact gathered in such a field as this, therefore,
can come amiss to those who tread the
walks of inductive philosophy; for in the
handbook of Nature, every such fact is a
syllable; and it is by patiently collecting fact
after fact, and by joining together syllable
after syllable, that we may finally seek to
read aright from the great volume which the
mariner at sea and the philosopher on the
mountain see spread out before them." So
speaks Lieutenant Maury, not as an innovator,
but an exponent of that chapter in the
history of seamanship which is to be found
on the new leaf that society is just now
turning over.

Of Mr. Maury's part in such a chapter
mention has been once or twice made in this
journal. A few lines of narrative are all
that we need now supply. In November,
eighteen hundred and fifty-one, application
was made by the English to the American
government for certain aid in enabling
officers of the Royal Engineers, on American
soil, to take meteorological observations upon
an uniform plan, and for any co-operation that
the scientific men of the United States might
be disposed to afford. To Lieutenant Maury,
in his capacity of Superintendent of the
National Observatory at Washington, this
application was in the natural course of
business referred. His reply was not merely
approval of the idea, but extension of it to a
systematic and uniform plan of observation,
not only on the soil of every country, but
among sailors over the surface of all seas.
This notion coming back to England, our
Royal Society reported against the idea of
attempting to procure the substitution of any
uniform system for the various plans of
observation used by various men of science
in one country and another, inasmuch as
their labours were already very valuable,
and (as we understand the report) they