The storm-waves of Australia reach a height of 80 feet; this fact is

connected with the vicinity of the Pole. Storms in those latitudes

result less from disorder of the winds than from submarine electrical

discharges. In the year 1866 the transatlantic cable was disturbed at

regular intervals in its working for two hours in the twenty-four--from

noon to two o'clock--by a sort of intermittent fever. Certain

compositions and decompositions of forces produce phenomena, and impose

themselves on the calculations of the seaman under pain of shipwreck.

The day that navigation, now a routine, shall become a mathematic; the

day we shall, for instance, seek to know why it is that in our regions

hot winds come sometimes from the north, and cold winds from the south;

the day we shall understand that diminutions of temperature are

proportionate to oceanic depths; the day we realize that the globe is a

vast loadstone polarized in immensity, with two axes--an axis of

rotation and an axis of effluvium--intersecting each other at the centre

of the earth, and that the magnetic poles turn round the geographical

poles; when those who risk life will choose to risk it scientifically;

when men shall navigate assured from studied uncertainty; when the

captain shall be a meteorologist; when the pilot shall be a chemist;

then will many catastrophes be avoided. The sea is magnetic as much as

aquatic: an ocean of unknown forces floats in the ocean of the waves,

or, one might say, on the surface. Only to behold in the sea a mass of

water is not to see it at all: the sea is an ebb and flow of fluid, as

much as a flux and reflux of liquid. It is, perhaps, complicated by

attractions even more than by hurricanes; molecular adhesion, manifested

among other phenomena by capillary attraction, although microscopic,

109

The Man Who Laughs