ll say that I find it easy to talk
on this subject, and that precept is harder than practice. I allow it, my
dear friend, in the practical part I have only to return kind affection
and attention for uniform tenderness and regard. I have nothing
unpleasant to call forth my forbearance. Day after day, month after month
passes, and I neither experience an angry look nor a dissatisfied word.
Our domestic life is an unvaried line of peace and comfort; and O, may
Heaven continue it such, so long as it shall permit us to dwell together
on this earth."

CHAPTER 29. THE NAVIGATOR.

Not only is Flinders to be regarded as a discoverer whose researches
completed the world's knowledge of the last extensive region of the
habitable globe remaining in his time to be revealed; not only as one
whose work was marked by an unrivalled exactitude and fineness of
observation; but also as one who did very much to advance the science of
navigation in directions calculated to make seafaring safer, more
certain, with better means and methods at disposal. Malte-Brun declared,
when he died, that "the geographical and nautical sciences have lost in
the person of Flinders one of their most brilliant ornaments,"* and that
criticism, coming from a foreign critic than whom there was no better
informed savant in Europe, was no mere piece of obituary rhetoric. (*
Annales des Voyages 23 268.)

In 1805 he wrote a paper on the Marine Barometer, based upon observations
made during his Australian voyages. The instrument employed was one which
had been used by Cook; Flinders always kept it in his cabin. He was the
first to discover, and this essay was the first attempt to show, the
connection between the rise and fall of the barometer and the direction
of the wind. Careful observation showed him that where his facts were
collected the mercury of the barometer rose some time before a change
from landbreeze to seabreeze, and fell before the change from seabreeze
to landbreeze. Consequently a change of wind might generally be predicted
from the barometer. The importance of these observations was at once
recognised by men connected with navigation. As the Edinburgh Review
wrote, dealing with Flinders' paper when presented before the Royal
Society on March 27th, 1806:* "It is very easy for us, speculating in our
closet upon the theory of winds and their connection with the
temperature, to talk of drawing a general inference on this subject with
confidence. But