No man ought to say that seamen have neglected science. It is the
fashion among some to talk of sailors as superstitious. They must
know very little about sailors, and must be very blind to broad
facts, who speak thus of them as a class. Many sailors, doubtless,
are superstitious. But I appeal to every master mariner here,
whether the superstitious men are generally the religious and godly
men; whether it is not generally the most reckless and profligate men
of the crew who are most afraid of sailing on a Friday, and who give
way to other silly fancies which I shall not mention in this sacred
place. And I appeal, too, to public experience, whether many, I may
say most, of those to whom seamanship and sea-science owes most, have
not been God-fearing Christian men?

Be sure of this, that if seamen, as a class, had been superstitious,
they would never have done for science what they have done. And what
they have done, all the world knows. To seamen, and to men connected
with the sea, what do we not owe, in geography, hydrography,
meteorology, astronomy, natural history? At the present moment, the
world owes them large improvements in dynamics, and in the new uses
of steam and iron. It may be fairly said that the mariner has done
more toward the knowledge of Nature than any other personage in the
world, save the physician.

For seamen have been forced, by the nature of their calling, to be
scientific men. From the very earliest ages in which the first canoe
put out to sea, the mariner has been educated by the most practical
of all schoolmasters, namely, danger. He has carried his life in his
hand day and night; he has had to battle with the most formidable and
the most seemingly capricious of the brute powers of nature; with