The Sea (La Mer)

The storm, which of all storms, I had the best opportunity of observing, was that which swept in fury over the west of France, from the 24th of October 1859, to the 31st of the...

Scarcely has the earth cast one glance upon herself ere she not merely compares herself to the Heavens above, but vaunts her own superiority. Geology, the mere infant, hurls a T...

What most tempts man? The difficult, the useless, the impossible. Of all maritime enterprises, that to which the most persistent energy has been given, is the north western pass...

Just as I was finishing this book, in December, 1860, resuscitated Italy, that great and glorious mother of the modern nations, sent me tidings, in the shape of a small book, a...

Who opened up to men the great distant navigation? Who revealed the Ocean, and marked out its zones and its liquid highways? Who discovered the secrets of the Globe? The Whale a...

It was inevitable that the free element, the Sea, should, sooner or later, produce a creature like unto herself, eminently free, undulating and fluid, gliding like the wave, but...

The water of the Sea, even the purest, examined when you are far away from land, and from all possible admixture, is somewhat viscuous; take some between your fingers, and you f...

I passed the early part of 1858 in the pleasant little town of Hyères which, from afar, gazes down on the sea, the islets and the peninsula by which its coast is sheltered. The...

It is but yesterday, as it were, that we have built ships fit for southern navigation; for navigation in those seas where the long, strong, _rollers_, pile themselves, each upon...

Behold me once more on shore. I had enough, and to spare, of shipwreck. I want durable races. The Cetaceæ must disappear. Let us moderate our conceptions, and, of that gigantic...

The oursin has carried the genius of defence to its utmost limit. His cuirass, or, preferably, his fortress of pieces, is at once movable and resisting, yet sensitive, retractil...

2. We are astonished to find him so unskilful in all that concerns the conciliation of the inhabitants of the various seas and lands, that he has conquered. Every where, the voy...

Impetuous is the channel where her strait receives the full rush of the North sea, and very turbulent is the sea of Brittany, rushing over basaltic shoals in swift and furious r...

Permit an ignoramus who, yet, has paid a pretty high price for what he _does_ know, to give you some quiet advice upon certain points upon which books, hitherto, have told you l...

Our Museum of Natural History, within its too narrow limits, contains a faëry palace in every part of which we see the genius of metamorphoses of Lamarck and Geoffroy. In the da...

There are three forms of Nature which especially expand and elevate our souls, release her from her heavy clay and earthy limits, and send her, exulting, to sail amidst the wond...

The Sea, so ill treated by man, in this pitiless warfare, has been to him most generously kind. When Earth, which he loves so much, when that rude Earth wears, weakens, exhausts...

"The fisherman belated at night in the North Sea," says Milton, "saw an isle, a shoal, which, like the back of an enormous mountain, lay upon the water, and in that isle or shoa...

From the bottom of his nets a fisherman one day gave me three almost dying creatures, a sea hedge-hog, a sea star, and another star, a pretty ophiure, which still moved and soon...

If, from some rich collection of armor, of the middle ages, immediately after examining the mighty masses of iron in which our knights of old oppressed and half stifled themselv...

At the heart of the globe, in the warm waters of the Line, and upon their volcanic bottoms, the sea so superabounds in life that it seems impossible for it to balance its multit...

"The Sailor who sights Greenland," says Captain John Ross, with a grave simplicity, "finds nothing to delight him with the sight." I can very well believe it. In the first place...

The headlands, the sandy beaches, the bold capes and the low shores, command various, but ever useful, views of the great sea, stern and wild at the first glance, but divine and...

When the excellent Doctor Livingstone visited the poor Africans who have so much difficulty in defending themselves against the Lion and the slave merchant, the women, seeing hi...

Earth is her own doctor; every climate has its own remedy. More and more will Medicine lie in Emigration. But it must be an Emigration of foresight, not one of those mad-cap, ra...

Five minutes after midnight of St. John's--24th to 25th of June, commences the great Herring Fishery, in the North Seas. Phosphoric lights gleam and flash upon the waters, and f...

There are occasional commotions of the sea, which Maury, in his forcible way, calls "the Sea's _spasms_." He especially alludes to the sudden movements which appear to proceed f...

It is a great and sudden transition to leave Paris in the beautiful month of June when the great city is resplendent with its magnificent gardens and its chestnut trees in bloom...

A gallant Dutch seaman, a cool and stern observer, who has passed his whole life at sea, frankly tells us that his feeling on first seeing the ocean was _fear_. For all terrestr...

The Medusæ and the Molluscs are generally innocent creatures, and I have thus far dwelt, as it were, with them in their amiable and peaceful world. Thus far I have met with few...

If, as certain French physicians maintain, sea-water baths have only a mechanical action, infuse no new principle into the blood and _are merely a simple branch of hydropathy_,...

Look upon the Ocean where and when you may, you everywhere and alway shall find her the same grand and terrible teacher of that hardest of all the lessons man has to learn,--man...

A great and deservedly popular writer, Eugene Noël, who throws a bright, broad light upon every subject which he touches, most truly says, in his important work on Pisciculture,...

We need not be at all surprised if childhood and ignorance are astounded, _astonied_, when they first find themselves face to face with that vast and mysterious Sphinx of the Gr...

It is with a very real and masterly genius that Maury has demonstrated the harmony that exists between air and water. As is the maritime ocean, so is the aërial ocean. Their alt...

Fish, in d'Orbigny's Dictionary. This last article is a complete book, learned and excellent. On the anatomy of Fish see the celebrated dissertation of Geoffroy. For what I have...

Chapters IV., V., VI., &c. Throughout this book, in ascending from inferior to superior life, I have taken for my guiding thread in the great labyrinth, the hypothesis of Metamo...

Articles _Mer et Matieres_; Zimmerman, the _World before Man_, a beautiful and popular work which is in every one's hands. I am indebted also to the work of M. Bronn, crowned by...

What I have said about St. George's, in Chapter 7, is much better said in Pelletan's books on _Royan_ and in his _Pasteur du Desert_. That Pastor, as is generally known, was the...