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To hydrographical science, if to nothing else, the results of the expedition were remarkable, and no less than forty-five new charts were produced by the indefatigable Messrs. Gressien and Paris. Nothing will better bring before us the richness of harvest of natural history specimens than the following quotation from Cuvier's report:
From which the following is an extract: Your arrival at Gage Roads, in her Majesty's surveying vessel, Beagle, under your command, affords me an opportunity of soliciting your able assistance towards the solution of a question of great interest, not only to the Western Australian Company, whom I represent, but to this colony at large; and I feel assured that your known zeal in the cause of Geographical and Hydrographical research will induce you, if it be within your power, to comply with the request which I now take the liberty to make.
Besides, the books that till his time were shut up in the archives of Babylon and Tyre were transferred to Alexandria; and thus the astronomical and hydrographical observations of the Phoenicians and Chaldeans, becoming accessible to the Greek philosophers, supplied them with the means of founding their geographical knowledge on the sure basis of mathematical science, of which it had hitherto been destitute.
For a long time D'Urville had wished to explore the Strait of Magellan, not with a view to further hydrographical surveys, for the careful explorations of Captain King, begun in 1826, had been finished in 1834 by Fitzroy, leaving little to be done in that direction, but to gather the rich and still unappropriated harvest of facts relating to natural history.
Searching among the archives for whatever might bear on the ancient history of these springs, Mr. Eames had accumulated abundant material for footnotes geological, hydrographical and balneo-therapic.
On the evening of the first day the colonists encamped about nine miles from Granite House, on the border of a little stream falling into the Mercy, and of the existence of which they had till then been ignorant; it evidently, however, belonged to the hydrographical system to which the soil owed its astonishing fertility.
"Yes," he often repeated; "if, on board of the 'Pilgrim, I had known all that a sailor should know, what misfortunes we would have escaped!" Thus spoke Dick Sand. At the age of eighteen he finished with distinction his hydrographical studies, and, honored with a brevet by special favor, he took command of one of Mr. Weldon's vessels.
The Bay of Islands was the place chosen for their field of effort by the English missionaries, who, notwithstanding their devotion to their work had not made any progress among the natives. The unproductiveness of their labours was only too apparent. The survey of the eastern side of New Zealand, a hydrographical work of the utmost importance, terminated at this point.
The Colonial Fleet is made up of some warships built in Holland and others built in India, expressly for the Indian service, including a number of small coasting-steamers and sailing-vessels, and a steamer or two specially detailed for hydrographical work.
It has been ascertained by MM. Buteux, Ravin, and other observers conversant with the geology of this part of France, that in none of the alluvial deposits, ancient or modern, are there any fragments of rocks foreign to the basin of the Somme no erratics which could only be explained by supposing them to have been brought by ice, during a general submergence of the country, from some other hydrographical basin.
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