The mapping out of extinct faunas and floras and assigning pedigree to existing species are by no means the whole province of geologists.  Productive industry owes to them a vast saving of time and cost in searching for useful minerals.  They distinguish the same strata in widely separated districts by means of the characteristic fossils, and are thus enabled to guide the miner.  A geological survey of its territory is one of the first cares of an enlightened government, and a geologist is the one scientific official the leading States of the Union agree in maintaining.  The science has moved forward steadily from its original office of studying buried deposits and classifying extinct organisms, until the hard and fast line between fossil and recent has disappeared, the continuous action of ordinary causes in past and present been established, and an unbroken domain assigned to the laws of the visible creation.  Deep-sea soundings have extended inquiry, slight enough as yet, to that immensely preponderant portion of the globe’s crust that is covered by water.  Penetrating the ocean is like penetrating the rocks, inasmuch as it introduces us to some of the same primal forms of life; but it presents them in an active and sentient state.  Neptune’s ravished secrets vindicate the Neptunists, while Pluto is relegated to the abode assigned him by classic myths, where he and his comrade, Vulcan, keep their furnaces alight and project their slag and smoke through many a roaring chimney.

Upon (as beneath) the deep, science is erecting for itself new homes.  It tracks the wandering wind, and moves at ease, calmly as a surveyor with chain and compass, through the eddies of the cyclone.  It maps for the sailor the currents, aerial and subaqueous, of each spot on the unmarked main, and sends him warning far ahead of the tempest.  It divides with the thermometer the mass of brine into horizontal zones, and assigns to each its special population.

A hundred years ago, only the surface of the land was studied, and but a small part of that.  All beneath its surface was a mystery, and the lore of the sea was untouched.  Now, knowledge has penetrated to the central fire, and of the sea it can be no longer said that man’s “control stops with its shores.”  The pathway of his messenger from continent to continent he has laid deep in its chalky ooze, while over it silt silently, flake by flake, as they have been falling since aeons before his creation, the induviae of the earliest creatures.

And this his messenger at the bottom of the sea is back in its old home.  First hidden in the electron cast up by the waves of the Baltic, it was left there, uncomprehended and barren, till our century.  During all that time it was calling from the clouds to man’s dazzled eye and deafened ear.  It pervaded the air he breathed, the ground he trod and the frame which constituted him.  It bore his will from brain to hand, and guarded his life, through the (so-called)