The doctor gave up his geographic descriptions to discourse on the history of his sea, which had indeed been the history of civilization, and was more fascinating to him.  At first miserable and scanty tribes had wandered along its coasts seeking their food from the crustaceans drawn from the waves—­a life similar to that of the rudimentary people that Ferragut had seen in the islands of the Pacific.  When stone saws had hollowed out the trunks of trees and human arms had ventured to spread the first rawhides to the forces of the atmosphere, the coasts became rapidly populated.

Temples were constructed on the promontories, and maritime cities—­the first nuclei of modern civilization—­came into existence.  On this landlocked sea mankind had learned the art of navigation.  Every one looked at the waves before looking at the sky.  Over this blue highway had arrived the miracles of life, and out of its depths the gods were born.  The Phoenicians—­Jews, become navigators—­abandoned their cities in the depths of the Mediterranean sack, in order to spread the mysterious knowledge of Egypt and the Asiatic monarchies all along the shores of the interior sea.  Afterwards the Greeks of the maritime republics took their places.

In Ferragut’s estimation the greatest honor to which Athens could lay claim was that she had been a democracy of sailors, her freemen serving their country as rowers and all her famous men as great marine officials.

“Themistocles and Pericles,” he added, “were admirals of fleets, and after commanding ships, governed their country.”

On that account Grecian civilization had spread itself everywhere and had become immortal instead of lessening and disappearing without fruit as in the interior lands.  Then Rome, terrestrial Rome, in order to hold its own against the superiority of the Semitic navigators of Carthage, had to teach the management of the oar and marine combat to the inhabitants of Latium, to their legionaries with faces hardened by the chin straps of their helmets, who did not know how to adjust their world-dominating iron-shod feet to the slippery planks of a vessel.

The divinities of mare nostrum always inspired a most loving devotion in the doctor.  He knew that they had not existed, but he, nevertheless, believed in them as poetic phantasms of natural forces.

The ancient world only knew the immense ocean in hypothesis, giving it the form of an aquatic girdle around the earth.  Oceanus was an old god with a long beard and horned head who lived in a maritime cavern with his wife, Tethys, and his three hundred daughters, the Oceanides.  No Argonaut had ever dared to come in contact with these mysterious divinities.  Only the grave Aeschylus had dared to portray the Oceanides—­virgins fresh and demure, weeping around the rock to which Prometheus was bound.