step in reading for a man is Durand's Marine Engineering.

There is an admirable book, Hillcoat's Notes on Stowage, that gives a world of information about the peculiarities in different kinds of cargo that you have to bear in mind as you fill your ship's holds.

Walton's Know Your Own Ship is a great standby for sailormen who want to understand ship construction and all the strains and other forces that play upon her once she is built.

A good book on the laws of storms, so far as anybody understands them, with lots of experiences told that various ships have had with winds and waters, is Allingham's Manual of Marine Meteorology.

By the time you have done this much with theory you will be ready to study with more system and will have got a line on the books and the schools that are necessary.

VII

SHIPPING AVOCATIONS

HERE are a good many slack hours in

THERE

a ship for both officers and men and both at sea and in port. People think of sailors as much more active than they actually are. Many a ship's officer needs dumb-bells to keep in good condition, particularly on a long voyage, and the crew aren't always swarming up and down rigging. In these slack hours a man with a ready mind who uses a little forethought, times he is in port, to get material for his mind, can fit himself to get ahead in his work and to take a lot more satisfaction in the life he is leading day by day. The trouble with most men is that they are lazier mentally than they are physically. Sailors drive into all kinds of ports, the very names of which make a man's mouth water, and you think they must be alive to a lot of mysterious things in the world. But you talk with the run of them, officers or crew, and you'll find only too often

that about all they know of the ports are the docks and the loafing and dissipating places. A man who means to get ahead and to have a happy life aboard ship while he is getting ahead and after he has got to the head ought to keep wide awake about a lot of things, big and little, that his life at sea touches.

A man ought to study astronomy. Any fool can work navigation without knowing much astronomy. Eight or ten stars that he can recognize will give him a chance to 66 get past the old man." But what's the use of it? There's time aplenty to try out all the navigational stars, and to be interested in a lot of them that aren't of any particular use for navigational purposes. Then there's the whole range of spectral astronomy, the most important modern development of the subject, that's of no imaginable use for navigation, but opens up the relationship between astronomy and chemistry, and is the greatest fairy-tale in the world. A book like Flammarion's on spectral astronomy gives a man all the lead he needs. Looking up at the sky won't help him much at it, the way it does with what you might call geographical astronomy, but it heightens a man's sense of understanding as he looks up at the stars, and gives him new thrills as he

thinks about it pacing the bridge or, if he is still a sailor, out on the fo'c'sle-head on watch, for a man will think on watch, even though he's supposed to do nothing but look.

Historical astronomy, too, ought to interest a man: Things like the date Neptune was discovered and how a man had figured it ought to be at that place in the skies, to account for the way some other planets were pulled, and then a powerful enough telescope was manufactured in the 1840's to show Neptune was actually there, though nobody had seen it or suspected it until the astronomer - mathematician worked out the theory that it ought to be there and a later astronomer-observer found it there for him; or the speculations of Professor Lowell about Mars being inhabited. A man needn't be in shape to insist about such things, or to argue about them, but there's no law to keep him from being alive to the fact that such things are proved or are argued about. And there's no reason that a live young fellow in the fo'c'sle shouldn't be as informed about it as the men in the officers' quarters. It is a trouble at first to locate the libraries and shops ashore where you can find this kind of information, but after you've broken into them once or twice it comes easy and

natural to go that way when you are in port, and that gives you another idea for putting in time evenings in port when you don't want to stay aboard ship but don't know exactly what else to do with yourself.

The same way with mathematics. Mighty little mathematics a man positively has to have in order to work his navigation problems. Adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying, with primary fractions and decimals, will about take care of it. Clever tables have been worked up by skilled mathematicians so that it is almost uncanny how you can jump over all the hard places, and by just running your finger up and down a column or two after you have found the page come out of the chart-room or your own cabin a few minutes after you have taken an observation with your sextant and have the correct result for all kinds of relations of the angles between the earth and the sun and the horizon and the equator and the zenith and the equinoctial and what not. It's the most royal road to the appearance of learning that has ever been devised for any group of mortal men. There is a saying at sea about this, that you don't have to know why, you only need to know how. But there is no reason a man shouldn't know why,