Exploration

FEBRUARY, 1906

BY N. S. SHALER

Now that the explorer’s work seems to be done, the great lands all trodden to their recesses, the seas thoroughly searched for any islands, their depths well searched by the plumbist, and only the poles awaiting his feet, it is time to take some account of his motive and the chance there may be for his successor to satisfy it in the age to come. To accomplish this, we shall first see something of the place of this world-searching impulse in history, and then, in the manner of the naturalist, seek how it came into the hearts of men.

We do not have to look far in order to find that the exploring motive is characteristic of certain times and peoples. In the old world of men among the folk of Eurasia and North Africa, though their culture was in many cases comparable to our own, the marks of the geographic form of curiosity shown in explorations are very limited. The Greeks of classic time whom we are accustomed to regard, and justly, as our near intellectual kinsmen, essentially lacked that motive. On the sea, though their ships were as good as those of the Norsemen, they never ventured beyond the Mediterranean and the Euxine; and they were obstinate coasters, keeping, when possible, within sight of the shores. On the land they never made any remote ventures; there is no account of a Greek in classic times having penetrated as far as western India or China on the east or to the Alps on the west. They were content with the fields they knew, and went only so far in them as they found immediate profit from traffic with their people. The few travelers, such as Herodotus, limited their goings to the easy ways of trade and to a range of a thousand miles or so from Athens; for the rest of the world their limited curiosity was satisfied with stories of winders they did not seek to behold.

The Romans, for all their desire to master the earth and their wade ranging conquests, show as little of the exploring motive as the Greeks. I have been unable to find a trace of a traveler who deliberately set forth upon such a search. It is curious that with all their administrative skill they do not seem ever to have sought information of the countries and peoples about them, even when they were planning long ahead for expeditions where the need of such knowledge should have been most evident; their humor seems to have been to march straight into the dark until they brought up against the impossible. Only among the Carthaginians do we find any evidence of the searching humor; on the sea they worked their way to the British Channel, developing a trade route which they used for centuries; and in at least one expedition they seem to have won south as far as the Cape of Good Hope. They seem also to have had a better sense of the land than any other of the ancients. The march of Hannibal into Italy, and that of Hasdrubal to Hannibal’s relief across Spain, southern France, over the Apennines and the Alps and down the Valley of the Po, with the evident purpose of descending the eastern coast of Italy, was planned and executed, until the defeat that overwhelmed him at the battle of Metaurus, in a way that showed he knew the lay of the land better than did the Romans of his time. Both these movements were worthy of Cæsar and more skillfully planned in relation to a wide field than any he made. There have, indeed, been no better executed marches in modern days.

Among the other Semitic peoples, the Carthaginians and the Arabs alone have shown any signs of an interest in unknown fields, and this did not lead them far over the seas, and, save in mere conquests, not at all over the land. The Hebrew folk, considering their high intellectual grade, had surprisingly little interest in the world beyond the narrow limits of their own country. Not only do they afford no trace of the exploration motive in Old Testament times, but to this day the Jews have had no part in such work. I have been unable to find an instance where an Israelite has become an explorer of the earth’s wildernesses. In view of the fact that in work of research in every department of natural science they have proved themselves able leaders of inquiry, this limitation is curious. We can understand this lack of interest of the race in the unknown world in the olden days for it is characteristic of all peoples when, escaped from the nomadic state, they come to have allotted fields for tillage and strongholds for safety; but the failure of this able people to take their share in the modern searching-out of the earth is curious.

The lack of the exploring motive which in ancient times characterized the peoples about the Mediterranean — for that matter all the settled folk of the world — continued down to about the end of the tenth century of our era. In all this period of about two thousand years, when the Mediterranean swarmed with ships perfectly well suited to cross the Atlantic in the tropical belt, there seems to have been no desire whatever to try that venture. In our state of mind, with such an opportunity for a dash into the unknown, half the craft of that sea would turn their prows westward; encountering the dangers for the chance of adventure and discovery. Nothing shows so well the difference between the ancient and the modern sense of the world and its mysteries as this failure of the wide sea to tempt brave and imaginative men to search its mysteries.

In part, the lack of the earth-exploring motive among the able people of ancient times is to be explained by the curiously obdurate belief that the earth was an unlimited surface with a boundless ocean lying beyond the lands. The Atlantic appears to have been generally believed to be a part of this circumambient, beyond which there was no reason to hope for other lands. The Greek men of science knew that the earth was a sphere: they had fairly well measured the curve of it and knew approximately its size; but their knowledge never became a part of the common store, and was forgotten until the beginning of modern times, when it had to be rediscovered. If we had the notion that the Atlantic was a limitless sea it is doubtful if it would prove tempting to explorers. It would be like a balloon course in the stellar spaces. In other part, the lack of the exploring motive among the ancients was due to the prevailing distrust in nature; to the belief that beyond the limits of demonstrated safety all was in the control of powders inimical to man. This is not the place to discuss the effect of the demon theory of nature, but it is evident that it had much to do with the development of the exploring as well as all other motives of inquiry.

Naturally enough, the first steps in exploration were made by the Norsemen, a folk who had remained apart from the Mediterranean civilizations, and had developed as no other people a valiant attitude as regards the sea. Their boats were less good than those of the south, and they had no better art of seamanship, but their hearts felt the temptation of the horizon. In the tenth century they began the attack on the North Atlantic in a succession of brave ventures which led to the discovery and settlement of Iceland and Greenland; and so further explorations were made, perhaps as far south as Nova Scotia and, as some have believed, even to the New England coast. While there may have been hope of gain in these daring voyages, they show the exploring motive; they are the first since the Carthaginian on which men ventured beyond the trodden ways of the seas, the very first where the ship masters dared to steer straight away from the land over the unknown deep.

Five hundred years before Columbus set sail on his memorable voyage, the Northmen had broken through the mystery of the western sea, and shown that it was only a larger Mediterranean, not a limitless expanse of waters; but their discoveries had no effect upon the imagination of man. But the state of mind of people had undergone a vast change in three centuries. The motives which had led to the crusades had given place to that of our modern life. Men believed in this world, and were eager for its opportunities of knowledge and of wealth. Quickly the states that faced the Atlantic were afoot for conquest. Spain, naturally the first, and with admirable courage and swiftness in the work; and England, France, and Portugal were no laggards in the race to the far-off goal. It was in this scramble for empire and for trade that the impulse of exploration came to be the most modern, and, in some ways, the most significant of all the motives awakened by the Renaissance, the new birth of European man.

In its first stages of growth the exploration motive was mingled with other impulses, with those of trade and of religious propaganda. With the Spaniards it remained associated with the desire for clerical and civil conquest. We find in it little trace of seeking for knowledge for its own sake. It was much the same in France, save that the religious motive had a larger share; the explorer’s motive among its wonderful group of missionaries is often very evident. In England, because of its previous religious history, and its partial emancipation from priestly control, the hampering influence of the propaganda motive had little share in western adventures. Now and then we hear of projects for Christianizing infidels, but it is a small voice in that roar for conquest of lands and trade which began in the days of Queen Bess. While in France and Spain the religious motive remained strong, almost dominant, in the purposes of the conquests of those states, it had no real place in England; our ancestors did no Christianizing of any account, — they were content with the simpler work of winning empire.

After all the attractive parts of the new world had been pillaged, and there were no more enticing fields for plunder, the better and purer form of the exploration motive began to take shape. In two hundred years the parting of the world had been substantially effected except as regards Africa. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the well-affirmed spirit of discovery had to find its way on other paths. Then begins what we may term the purely scientific stage of the motive,—that in which the main if not the only end sought is the extension of knowledge. Probably because of the semi-agnostic state of mind of the English people, and consequent general lack of interest in religious propaganda of the Spanish kind, the separation of the existing motive from its old associations was more quickly accomplished among them than elsewhere. Other folk have done nearly as much in revealing the land and seas, but the British were the first to send forth a host of explorers who sought knowledge for its own sake.

It is interesting to note that the waters of sea and land were the first features to stimulate this scientific curiosity. When the shapes of the oceans were fairly welldetermined, the imagination of these seekers of the unknown turned to the rivers, a field of enduring and fascinating mystery. All who have had the good fortune in their youth to dwell by a great river, — and even the small are in this regard great,—must have felt the desire to seek out its sources and trace their passage to the sea. In my childhood, I dwelt beside the Ohio, and found in its tide the greatest stimulus that came to my youthful imagination. The floods and shrinkings of the stream, the boats and rafts upon it, all moved me strongly to run away and turn explorer. That I did not essay the adventure was due to that fear of the unknown which is strong in infancy, and in most persists after maturity. This curiosity concerning the sources and courses of rivers was strongest concerning the Nile, the supremely mysterious stream. More than any other geographic feature it has served to quicken the minds of the British folk to exploration. So, first through the seas and then through the streams, in a far lesser way across the great lands, men gave shape to their interests which bade them search the world.

It is interesting to see the diversity of the exploration motive among diverse peoples; in general it may be said to be a possession of certain branches of Aryan stock, for while there are exceptions, as in the case of the Carthaginians, they are unimportant. The able Turanian folk, though now and then they have broken forth in marches of conquest, seem never to have felt the exploring impulse. From what we know of them we cannot conceive a Chinese Marco Polo making his way to the Mediterranean. The eastern Aryans of Persia and India appear to have been as little moved to assail the seas and lands as the Chinese. It was about as easy to journey from the Bay of Bengal to Australia as from the Mediterranean to Britain, but the journey seems never to have been made. Among the western Aryans, those alone whose states bordered on the Atlantic or the Mediterranean spontaneously came by the motive. Germany and Russia have shared in this spirit but it has been second-hand, by the contagion of example. Among the people of all these states in touch with the western sea, it remains strong at least with those who have manly strength. Admirable examples of the exploring motive in its best shape abound in the biographies of English-speaking people from Great Britain and America. For their numbers the Scandinavians have afforded an even larger proportion of these brave adventures, while Germany and France have made notable contributions to this valiant host of truth-seekers. That the motive still lives in those of Iberian blood is shown by the recent remarkable explorations of General Reyes of Equador, said to be of pure Spanish blood, in about the last remaining great unexplored field, — that of South America just east of the Andes. Report has it that he began his remarkable journeys in fleeing from his enemies in a revolution, by way of the Orinoco River to the sea. In the adventures of this escape he acquired that hunger for the horizon which is apt to possess all hardy spirits who by any chance are cast away in the wilderness. His journeys are, in certain ways, among the most important achievements of the explorers of his generation, and make us look with unwonted interest upon his last revolutionary essay, by which he has become dictator of his country.

It has been my good fortune to know several men who were possessed with what we may call the divine fury of exploration. The most interesting of them, as an illustration of the suddenness and intensity of the possession, was Captain Hall of Arctic fame. When I was a lad, Hall was a seal engraver in Cincinnati, a rather commonplace person engaged in an eminently sedentary occupation. Stories of Arctic travel had a curious fascination for me even before my teens, so I came to know something of him, and shared in his longing for the preposterous north pole, in itself no more worthy of seeking than any other point in a square mile of inhospitable sea or land. Hall’s ideas gradually became fixed on this crusade. He gave up his business and, in time, his life, to the mad search. His mania, as my childish devotion to the pole, was probably in part due to the traditions of Symms of “Symms’ hole” fame, who shaped his mania in Cincinnati, and left a curious and enduring tradition of it among the many speculative people of that town.

Although about the beginning of the nineteenth century, exploration for conquest having practically terminated, the motive took on its truly modern scientific shape, the work done by these seekers after pure truth has still had no small influence on the history of the states whence they came. The territorial interest which England has in Africa, which now promises to give her substantial control of the more valuable parts of that continent, is in large measure due to the wilderness-breaking spirit of her adventurous men. It has made all her boundaries here and on other continents no more than camp lines to be moved onward at the next beat of reveille. Other folk have built walls to their empires and been content to seek no farther, but her explorers have kept up the search, and her banners have followed them. So in the later, as in the earlier, form of this hunger of the unknown, have been the shapes of our great modern states. Whether in association with the motives of trade, of political conquest, of religious fanaticism, or in the later day as a pure seeking for knowledge, it has been a momentous influence in the destinies of men.

Turning now to the natural history of the exploration motive let us see if we can trace it in the life below the level of our kind, and so determine whether or no it is a property of man’s intellectual estate. As in all such efforts to look downward into the life whence man was derived, we encounter a serious difficulty in the fact that our lineal ancestors among the brutes have vanished from the earth: it is effectively certain that not a single species is now living that had any share in handing on our life in its long advance. In all our studies of this kind we have to trust to what we can observe among our collateral kindred, our cousins of remote degree. We do this safely as regards the main psychic features of animals, for our knowledge shows that the likeness in the mental realm is, so far as the simpler impulses of the mind, quite as great as in the bodily parts between the manlike apes and man; there is no difference save in proportion in their organs, bones, muscles, and other elements of structure, and in both we find the fundamental qualities of the intelligence equally alike, though with far greater differences in proportion.

Among the apes we find the impulse of curiosity, which is at the foundation of the exploring motive, as well-developed as it is in man. In this regard they are curiously like human children or the grown people of the lower races. They are in their way explorers; their habits are generally social; they form herds or droves, and these groups are not domiciled but of wide ranging habit. They have pushed out very far from their centre of origin, which seems to have been somewhere about the shores of the Indian Ocean, so that they have come to occupy every part of the earth to which they could gain access which was fitted to their needs. In fact, there is no group of mammals which in the same length of geologic time has won so far around the world. Considering that all the apes are arborial in habit and that only the rare and higher species are accustomed to travel for any distance on the surface of the earth, the distribution of the group shows that they have long been — probably from the beginning — explorers of the unknown.

Among the mammals of a lower grade than the apes, at least among all those of social habits, the exploring motive in the form that makes them seek for “fresh fields and pastures new ” is, if not stronger, even more traceable than in the nearer kindred of man. Every country-bred person knows by experience the insistent way in which our domesticated animals, though wonted to barriers, and selected for their willingness to be confined by them, are always “breachy,” that is, addicted to exploration. Even among sheep, the dullest-witted of the servants we have on a farm, the primitive desire for the unknown is most evident. This is well shown by a recent experience I have had with them. Half a dozen Hampshiredowns were well fenced in a small field where they had every element of ovine luxury, yet they chafed and studied every chance of freedom. On one occasion they escaped through the gate to the chance of lean pastures. When harried back by the shepherd and his dog, one would have supposed that their experience with the wilderness would have bred content, but ever afterwards they watched that gate, and the buck when he thought he was unobserved would try to butt it open. Here was an evident case of that hunger for the horizon which seems even more innate with most beasts than with men.

Among certain mammals, most evidently with the rodents, the exploring motive at times takes on what seems a maniacal form. This occurs occasionally among the squirrels of the Alleghenies, when they move westward in hordes which sometimes bring devastation to the crops of the country over which they pass. It is even more clearly shown in the lemming of northern Scandinavia, which, at intervals of years, move in great hosts westward as fast as they can travel, stopping at no bounds, but going onward until the survivors of the expedition reach the sea, and swim out into it until they are drowned.

Among the birds the outgoing humor is even more manifested than in the mammals. It has been with many forms wonderfully organized into systematic migrations, which may take the hosts over waters as wide as the Mediterranean in their biennial movements between Africa and Europe, — the small, weak-winged forms, it is said, taking passage on the backs of the stronger creatures, such as the storks. We may note the same motive in the lower vertebrates, the fishes, or, yet further down the scale, in the insects, — it is excellently well shown in flies, — so that we find that the humor for marching forth for new chances in life seems to be almost a common quality of intelligence, whether we name it rational or instinctive. As to the origin of it we may, if we please, have recourse to the notions of the extreme selectionists, — not the true followers of Darwin; they tell us that the form of geographic curiosity which leads to the exploring habit of animals is profitable as it adds to the chances of survival, and that the slightest beginnings of it would be accumulated by the process of natural selection from generation to generation, so that it would be in the course of time firmly established. There is no better cloak for ignorance or more effective check to inquiry than this ready system of question-begging by the use of the phrase “ the survival of the fittest.” Here, or often elsewhere, we have no evidence whatever that the exploring motive was developed by such a process. It is safer to take it as a quality of intelligence, and thus to certify our ignorance as to the manner in which it came to be.

Thus far only can we see into the mystery of the motive which leads sentient creatures to explore the world about them. We see that in every species of animals wherein any kind of intelligence develops to a high grade, curiosity awakens. Where they behold something that is unfamiliar, though the sight of it commonly awakens fear, it at the same time provokes an insistent desire to know more of it. We note this state of mind in squid, in some of the insects, in fishes, in reptiles, and in practically all the species of birds and mammals. Where it leads the creatures, as it commonly does, to explore the fields about them, we can give the most rational account of the process by supposing that, as in ourselves, the imagination makes some sort of a picture of what the unseen holds; this excites the curiosity, and action must be had to relieve it.

However we may seek to account for the impulse to go forth in search of the unknown, it is evident that it is not a peculiarity of man’s estate, but came to him, as the beginnings of all else, from the lower life, where the seeds of his good and evil were shaped. So, too, it is plain that in the first stage of his life as man he was by nature a nomad. This wandering stage was long-continued; it probably represents many times the duration of his sedentary life such as we see about us. Thus the American Indians, an able people who were well advanced in the way towards civilization, were still so possessed with the wandering humor that their tribes moved about ceaselessly in the process of conquering or being conquered. It is evident that individuals became explorers of no mean ability; some of them ranged in their passages from the Atlantic to the Pacific side of North America. The movements of the tribes in Africa and of the better known peoples of the great Eurasian land show the same excursive motive. The vast migrations of the Teutonic tribes which broke down the Roman Empire, from the naturalist’s point of view much resemble the occasional eruptions of the lemming as above described. A large part of human history is to be read in the light which a knowledge of this exploring impulse throws upon what would otherwise be inexplicable.

When in the course of advance towards civilized conditions originally nomadic, man came to have possessions that tempted competitors of his kind; when he had come by flocks and herds; and even more, when he became the soil tiller, and advanced farther in wealth, — he needed strongholds for defence. As soon as a tribe has built any efficient fortress it becomes attached to the field it occupies and protects. This place of safety, as the art of war develops, soon represents the largest and most important property of the folk. The hold almost always encloses a dwelling-place where because of the permanence of occupation, houses take the place of tents; the commonwealth is organized with reference to it; shrines and memories help to make the place dear. In this, the domiciled state of man, the main object of the society is to keep itself safe from the foes who are certain to be nearby and ever dangerous. Any indulgence of the exploring motive leads the wandering among aliens, and commonly enough to death. Thus it comes about that forth-going is apt to be condemned, so that even in a highly civilized country, such as Japan was half a century ago, any effort to go beyond the boundaries of the state may be looked upon as treason. It is, in some part, to this effect of war in making men profoundly sedentary that we may fairly attribute the decay of the exploration motive in the civilizations of classic times, such as we have noted among the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans.

The return of the nomadic exploration motive in the period following the Renaissance appears to have been due, as are most such events, to several causes: to the intensity of the competition in trade of several strong states, each able to give a good measure of protection to its citizens who might wander; to a better sense of natural law, which, in part, cleared away the old notions of danger from demons in the wilderness. In part it may have been brought about by one of those curious tides of the common spirit, such as sets herds of animals in motion after a long period of repose. It is evident that the first stages of this modern movement of exploration have passed. There are still a few rivers to be traced to their sources, the poles are untouched, and there are untrodden peaks to be climbed; but as a field of cursory exploration in the manner of the great leaders in such adventures, the resources of the world are so nearly exhausted that a generation may bring the end of opportunity. The question arises, will this end lead to another decay of this primitive motive, as did the beginnings of civilization when man first became sedentary ? The answer to this is easily made by any one who will attentively regard the curious movements of the inquiring humor of which the exploring motive is but one phase.

Considering the future of exploration, we should at first note that, while from the point of view of the path-breaker, who has his main satisfaction — sometimes the whole of it — in knowing that his feet are the first to break the way, the seas and lands are, so to speak, worn out, they are still virgin fields to those who have the modern sense of what exploration really means. So far, we have done for the greater part of the world no more than would a traveler who, bent on discovering Rome, should make the rounds of its walls, jot down the sites, and note the appearance of certain of its buildings, and then go on. If Rome had never been seen before, this might be a useful thing to do, as it might lead to real inquiries. This is about the condition of the work done by most, we may fairly say all, of the socalled explorers; they make the ways ready for true exploration. Those who try to find the basis of large understandings in their records are always disappointed; they see only the place where work needs be done. This is no basis for blame; they were path-breakers, and the place of such is sure and they are worthy of praise.

The real exploration of the world has to be done, and endlessly done over, by men who go to its fields of land and sea for very definite purposes, — to satisfy the needs of the learning of their time. Only the mere fringes of this endeavor will be devoted to climbing peaks or winning a few miles nearer to a mere geographical definition, such as the north or south pole. The cause of true exploration will be vastly advanced when some real observer with the spirit of the naturalist finds himself within, say, fifty miles of the pole, with a sea beneath him that by soundings proves that there is no land polewards; who then deliberately gives up the satisfaction of putting his feet a little nearer to that field in which the wobbly axis of the earth ends, in order that he may save time and force for better uses. That man will stand for the new type of explorer who represents the motive of our time as the captains of the Spanish forays in the new world represented the crude and brutal form of the impulse four hundred years ago. We are to glance at those fields that await the modern explorer, and are to give him the same inspiration that the men of old won when they knew they

There is, it is true, a certain pure physical delight in being, won in the mere seeming, for it is rarely we are sure that we are the first in the seeming unknown. But this delight is somewhat childish; it is like that of the big game hunter who has the satisfaction that in killing an elephant he has done what no one else has done, or will do, for that particular beast. Most newly discovered seas have been plowed by unknown keels, and there are few square miles of land which have not been trodden by many feet. The mountain-climber — one of the commonest embodiments of the exploring motive — most often finds on the virgin summit or in the cañon a beer bottle and the card of John Doe.

As a lad, I found my way to the exploring motive in the caverns of Kentucky; they are endless in number and in their narrow range of beautiful and mysterious ways. I well remember, on breaking into the first of these untraversed, as it seemed previously unknown, deeps, how delighted I was to feel that I was where no human being had ever been before. It was short-lived, for soon I found in the dust the print of Indian moccasined feet, showing that before the wall of stalactites and stalagmites, through which I had broken my way, was formed, those ancients had been there. To the real explorers who are to discover the earth this question of antecedent keels or feet will have no importance, for they are sure that what they seek has been found by no predecessor.

Taking first that part of the work of exploration which has the charm of coming from the battle with the elements and the difficulties of the earth, — in the realm of modern geography there is a host of most important problems resting upon the shape of the surface. Every ridge, lake, and hill has the value to the student in this field that the inscriptions of antiquity have to the historian. These records cannot be brought into our museums; they must be interpreted by the geographer on the ground and with strenuous labor. When that task is done, comes the geologist, who, beginning where the geographer leaves off, sets himself to read the remoter past of the area. His problems are so numerous that no one man or age can command them all. He brings back his store for discussion, to find that for one point which his explorations have settled, there are two others that are raised in the process, each more important than that which has been determined, — that is the best part of his large rewards. To the outsider, the nonnaturalist, this may seem a Sisyphean occupation; but if Sisyphus had been paid a good wage for the first rolling of his ball, and found his wage doubled for each subsequent journey, he would have liked his task.

It is not possible to give here, even with the utmost brevity, an idea of what awaits exploration. Some notion of the problems as we see them — the man of a hundred years hence will surely double the host — may be formed by considering what has to be done in North America alone, the best known of all the true continents, for Europe is but a fringe of the great Eurasian land. Considered from the point of what is termed the modern geography, perhaps one third of this land is fairly well understood, though every decade demands new investigations with reference to questions which were not suggested ten years before. So far as we can foresee, the geographic problems of the continent will need the explorer for generations to come.

In the domain of geology the expansion of problems, with the process of solving those we have in hand, is vastly greater than in the more limited field of pure geography. A few years ago the more confident men of science seem to have been of the opinion that the riddles of our continents might be read with a few decades of hard work, such as is now being devoted to them; but at every step the horizon expands, and a wilderness of new questions opens before us; something of what the geographer essays to do with the earth as it is, the geologist must strive to do for the stages of the past. One of his tasks is to trace the steps by which the vast structure took its present shape, whence came the forces which built it, and in what successions and in what areas they were applied. Another is to decipher from the records what were its climatal conditions at various stages in the succession. Thus, to give a single instance, I may cite the problems raised by certain beds of salt which occur in the United States: in brief these are as follows :

The rock salt deposits above referred to lie in two fields, the one in the district near Lake Erie, the other near the mouth of the Mississippi. Now a deposit of salt means that enclosed basins existed in an extremely arid climate, such as we now find at the Great Salt Lake of Utah, and in sundry other desert countries. Such conditions depend upon peculiarities of geography; they are never of world-wide extension. At present, and for all recent geological time, we have evidence that the climate of the places where these salt beds occur has been blessed with a large rainfall. What then were the conditions which led to the development of dead seas in these areas ? The solution of this interesting question will depend upon the results of a great amount of geological exploration; on the study and interpretation of the continental form in former geological periods; the course of the currents of the air and sea; in effect, on the reconstruction of an ancient geography. Volumes could be filled with a mere list of these riddles, the solution of which will lead the explorer far afield over the surface of the earth, back into remote ages, and most of all into his divining spirit, the widest of the great deeps.

Interesting as are the questions of physical geology, there are very many like that just above noted; they are not the best that science affords. Better are to be found: better because they call for yet higher ability and farther-going inquiry for their solution. Of these, the more important concern the origin of the earth and its relation to the other spheres of space, and the history of organic life upon it. Both these fields of inquiry are, even in the imperfect seeing of our day, amazingly rich in problems which call for the best the exploring spirit has to give, and in return will give to it the noblest rewards that come to the path - breaker. Of the two groups, that which concerns the history of life is the richer, and work in it involves more of contact with the earth’s surface. These problems of Paleontology — that tedious word for ancient life — once seemed delightfully simple. You had only to gather the fossil remains period by period, describe the species in set phrase with good pictures, and behold you had done your paleontology. We begin to see that this dry-as-dust performance is a parody on the history of ancient life: it is no more than a list of Greek verbs would be in the story of Hellenic life. It will be centuries before the records of that life are explored, and the task demands that the surface of every visible part of the continent be scanned often with the care of those who search for a lost jewel. Even when they are least expected these records may be found by the eye trained as that of an Indian in following a trail. Again, an instance from my own experience.

Near thirty years ago, in a deposit of glacial drift on Aquidneck Island, near Newport, I found a fragment of stone with a mere ghost of a fossil upon it, so faint that many persons skilled in such matters were not sure that it was really an imprint of a trilobite, which it seemed to me to be. The bit of stone had evidently come far and been carried along by the ice of the last glacial period. Taking the course of the ice flow from the averaged direction of many glacial scratches, I followed up the trail, searching the exposures of drift for other like bits. Spare time for ten years went to this task; days of searching often brought nothing but a sense that I was off the trail. Turning east and west it would again be found. At length, some thirty miles away from the first discovery, well hidden from view, the bed rock from which the bits came was found. The locality yielded a treasure in the remains of some twenty species of fossils, proving the existence of an ancient assemblage of marine life in a field where it had not been known to exist. I have felt a bit of the pleasure which comes from the feeling that one is the first to stand where man’s foot has not trod before, and I know that successful trailing, such as has just been described, affords a far nobler delight.

The task of the student of organic fossils, unseen a generation ago for all that thousands of works had already been printed concerning it, now begins to be disclosed. He is to trace the steps, admirably well recorded in the rocks, though hard to find out, by which in its ascending series each of the groups of animals and plants advanced. He is also to trace the march of those great hosts of living beings, the combined faunas and floras of the past, in the seas and on the lands, in their endless journeys for fit dwelling-places, or for a chance of life in the course of geographical and climatal change. These are vast and far-ranging problems. Hosts of able men of the centuries to come are to be engaged in their solution, and from the good work of these explorers our successors will know amazingly more of what life is than we can hope to. Every step of these journeys, whether made on the earth or in the realms of the imagination, whereto the naturalist even as the poet has to take himself, will give the uplifting sense that is the explorer’s reward.

Besides the great and long-enduring work of far-ranging inquiry which relates to the surface and understructure of the earth, and so makes it necessary for the investigator to spend a large part of his days in its wildernesses, there is endlessly more to be done in the laboratory in ways where, though he has not the inspiration of the open nature, he still may have a full share of the joy that discovery brings to the seeker. The range and scope of these problems is practically infinite, for they go to the infinite field of natural action. In the sciences of physics, chemistry, and astronomy, even more than in geography and geology, each solution brings a revelation of new problems to be solved. Each step upwards in understanding even now is seen to lead to the limitless. How it grows may be seen by a glance at the recent development of our knowledge concerning those movements of matter which we call rays. A generation ago, physicists generally believed that they had in a way touched bottom in this field of inquiry. They thought they saw pretty certainly that all matter had a foundation in minute somethings termed atoms, each indivisible, endued with unchangeable properties. These bits, more or less aggregated, were supposed to swim in an ocean of organized nothingness, the ether. Through these masses of atoms and the all-enveloping ether certain kinds of movements, such as those we sense as light and heat, in variety rather limited perhaps, in all a dozen or so kinds, were known to run. This was conceived to be something like the story of matter in its more general aspects. Now began the recent pathbreaking into this great wilderness; in succession one group of rays after another was discovered, so that it became evident that the realm of the invisible was the seat of, perhaps, innumerable kinds of these movements, each with its peculiar qualities and effects upon matter. A step further and the phenomena of radioactivity were found out, and it began to be seen that in a great variety of atoms, perhaps in all of them, there is a local indigenous production of rays, as in the socalled radium, by virtue of which these supposed obdurate units of matter are now seen to be in their nature like the sun, able in some way, as yet uncertain as to its nature, to pour forth energy in the form of light and heat even as does the sun.

It is too soon for certainties as to the ultimate meaning of the recent discoveries concerning the constitution of the atoms and the range of vibrations and pulsations which take place in it. For my purpose it is only necessary to see that they have opened a wider realm to the explorer than did the voyage of Columbus. As in his day, a host of hardy adventurers are forth to win what the first of the path-breakers showed the way to. They are sure of a nobler pleasure in their reward, for it is free from the greed of material conquest. They have the Columbian spirit, but it is purged of the ancient iniquities that made the results shameful. Theirs is the better winning, in their own eyes as in those of men to come.

Looking back over the history of the exploration motive, we see, even from this mere glance at the successions of its development, a beautiful series of events which well illustrates the way in which the impulses sent on to us from our ancestry among the brutes and fishes are developed in the brutal stages of man, and finally enlarged and purified in his higher estate. The foundation of the motive is clearly to be found in that curiosity concerning any unknown thing which attracts the attention of a mind even when it is lodged in a lowly form. This is intensified as the minds become abler, until in the apes it becomes characteristic and we see a passion for a primitive kind of inquiry. In the first stages of man it was evidently strong, for it impels these creatures, ill-provided with strength for journeys or with protection from evils of climate, to range over the earth as no brute has ever done.

When peoples originally migratory come to the soil-tilling state, or even before that stage is attained, the need of protection from the dangers of war leads to building strongholds and to the residence habit. In that state the hunger for the horizon is for a time stilled; it is further limited by the fear that develops of the unknown, peopled with demons that will assail the traveler. Finally we come to the modern stage, where men begin to see the world as a realm controlled by natural law; they learn that it is not infinitely large, but a sphere that can be compassed by the imagination and round which they can hope to sail. They go forth for conquests, for booty, for new kingdoms, for aggrandisement of faith or fatherland, or for trade; not at all at first for knowledge pure and simple. Gradually, as the earlier greeds are satisfied, or no longer can be for lack of further opportunity, the scientific exploring stage is attained; men now seek to break into mysteries for the sake of knowledge.

Now that the crude ransacking of the earth, to find how its remote parts look to uninformed eyes, is by, we are coming to the last stage of the developing motive of exploration, or at least what seems to us to be the last stage, and can fairly well discern what are hereafter to be the paths of the path-breakers as they go forward with their tasks. So far as the interpretation of the earth’s shape and structure is concerned, the explorer of the eighteenth century type is as archaic and unserviceable in our contest with the unknown as the military engines and tactics of Roman times would be in modern war. Fortunately the change in the spirit of exploration has come with the change in conditions. We see that the mad desire for the pole as pole is as chimerical as de Soto’s search, for we have come to set further and more rational goals for our quests than the men of his time. If our ideal be no higher than the pleasure to be had from striving and success, we know that the reward of a Newton or a Pasteur or any of the great host who explore the vast wildernesses of the realm, though it may be in their closets, is greater than awaits the man who discovered a continent. Men have come to see that the place and privilege of the higher explorers is, in the language of Virgil concerning the gods, to fare through all the realms of the seas and lands and the depths of the heavens, —