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.

Other more approachable deities were those of the eternal sea on whose
borders were