regular intervals in its working for two hours in the twenty-four--from
noon to two o'clock--by a sort of intermittent fever. Certain
compositions and decompositions of forces produce phenomena, and impose
themselves on the calculations of the seaman under pain of shipwreck.
The day that navigation, now a routine, shall become a mathematic; the
day we shall, for instance, seek to know why it is that in our regions
hot winds come sometimes from the north, and cold winds from the south;
the day we shall understand that diminutions of temperature are
proportionate to oceanic depths; the day we realize that the globe is a
vast loadstone polarized in immensity, with two axes--an axis of
rotation and an axis of effluvium--intersecting each other at the centre
of the earth, and that the magnetic poles turn round the geographical
poles; when those who risk life will choose to risk it scientifically;
when men shall navigate assured from studied uncertainty; when the
captain shall be a meteorologist; when the pilot shall be a chemist;
then will many catastrophes be avoided. The sea is magnetic as much as
aquatic: an ocean of unknown forces floats in the ocean of the waves,
or, one might say, on the surface. Only to behold in the sea a mass of
water is not to see it at all: the sea is an ebb and flow of fluid, as
much as a flux and reflux of liquid. It is, perhaps, complicated by
attractions even more than by hurricanes; molecular adhesion, manifested
among other phenomena by capillary attraction, although microscopic,
takes in ocean its place in the grandeur of immensity; and the wave of
effluvium sometimes aids, sometimes counteracts, the wave of the air and
the wave of the waters. He who is ignorant of electric law is ignorant
of hydraulic law; for the one intermixes with the other. It is true
there is no study more difficult nor more obscure; it verges on
empiricism, just as astronomy verges on astrology; and yet without this
study there is no navigation. Having said this much we will pass on.