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A large amount of important scientific work was carried out. The meteorological observations in particular have an economic bearing. The hydrographical work in the Weddell Sea has done much to clear up the mystery of this, the least known of all the seas.
The Mediterranean, with its hydrographical configuration, excluding from its great peninsulas the extremes of heat and cold, seems destined to nourish the most exquisite sentiment of the Beautiful.
We know that many large areas of land are rising and others sinking, and unless it could be assumed that both the upward and downward movements are everywhere uniform, many of the existing hydrographical basins ought to have the appearance of having been temporary lakes first filled with fluviatile strata and then partially re-excavated.
"In the geographical department," said Duperrey, "we would propose to verify or to rectify, either by direct, or by chronometrical observations, the position of a great number of points in different parts of the globe, especially among the numerous island groups of the Pacific Ocean, notorious for shipwrecks, and so remarkable for the character and the form of the shoals, sandbanks, and reefs, of which they in part consist; also to trace new routes through the Dangerous Archipelago and the Society Islands, side by side with those taken by Quiros, Wallis, Bougainville, and Cook; to carry on hydrographical surveys in continuation of those made in the voyages of D'Entrecasteaux and of Freycinet in Polynesia, New Holland, and the Molucca Islands; and particularly to visit the Caroline Islands, discovered by Magellan, about which, with the exception of the eastern side, examined in our own time by Captain Kotzebue, we have only very vague information, communicated by the missionaries, and by them learnt from stories told by savages who had lost their way and were driven in their canoes upon the Marianne Islands.
This region is of great importance to the geologist, who will be enabled to read much of the history of the Antarctic in the rocks. "Both the ships of the Expedition will be equipped for dredging, sounding, and every variety of hydrographical work.
In all this long passage across the Pacific, nearly in the lat. of 13° N. we saw neither fish nor fowl except once, when by my reckoning we were 5975 miles west from Cape Corientes in Mexico, and then we saw a vast number of boobies, supposed to come from some rocks not far off, which are laid down in some hydrographical charts, but we saw them not.
And the provinces to which the river has given its name have acknowledged right to call themselves the healthiest of a country which is one of the finest on the earth. And how can we say that the hydrographical system of the Amazon is not known?
In the countless Post-Miocene ages which preceded the glacial period there was ample time for the slow erosion by water of all the principal hydrographical basins of the Alps, and the sites of all the great lakes coincide, as Professor Ramsay truly says, with these great lines of drainage.
The Reuss has also stamped the lithological character of its own mountainous region upon the lower part of its hydrographical basin by covering it with its peculiar Alpine drift.
The Mediterranean is not included in the Challenger's route, but she will visit one of the most promising and little explored of hydrographical regions the North Pacific, between Polynesia and the Asiatic and American shores; and doubtless the store of observations upon the currents of this region, which she will accumulate, when compared with what we know of the North Atlantic, will throw a powerful light upon the present obscurity of the Gulf-stream problem.
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