eckless of money, very fond of his
calling, unhappy on shore, manly, noble-hearted, generous to a degree
inconceivable to landsmen. He is a child who needs to be put in
leading-strings the moment he comes over the side, lest he give way to
an unconquerable propensity of his to fry gold watches and devour
bank-notes, _a la sandwich_, with his bread and butter.

With this theory in view, all sorts of nice schemes are set forward for
the sailor, and endless are the dull and decorous substitutes for the
merriment or sociability of his favorite boarding-house, and wonderful
are the schemes which are to attract the nautical Hercules to choose
the austere virtue and neglect the rollicking and easy-going vice.
Beautiful on paper, admirable in reports, pathetic in speeches,--all
pictorial with anchors and cables and polar stars, with the light-house
of Duty and the shoals of Sin. But meanwhile the character of the
merchant-marine is daily deteriorating. More is done for the sailor now
by fifty times than was done fifty years ago; yet who will compare the
crews of 1858 with those of 1808?

There are many reasons for this change, and one is Science. That which
always makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, and which can be made
to restore the lost equilibrium in a higher civilization only by the
strong pressure of an enlightened Christianity, has been at work upon
the sea. Columbus sailed out of Palos in a very different looking craft
from the "Great Republic." The Vikings had small knowledge of taking a
lunar, and of chronometers set by Greenwich time. Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
when he so gallantly and piously reminded his crew that "heaven was as
near by sea as on land," was sitting in the stern of a craft hardly so
large as the long-boat of a modern merchantman. Yet the modern time
does not give us commanders such as were of old, still less such
seamen. Science has robbed the sea of its secret,--is every day bearing
away something of the old difficulties and dangers which made the
wisest head and the strongest arm so dear to their fellows, which gave
that inexpressible sense of brotherhood. Science has given us the
steamship,--it has destroyed the sailor. The age of discovery is
closing with this century. Up to the limits of the ice-fields, every
shore is mapped out, every shoal sounded. Not only does Science give
the fixed, but she is even transferring to her charts the variable
features of the deep,--the sliding current, the