PHILOSOPHY. TREASURES OF THE DEEP. WHEN We reflect on the number of curious monuments consigned to the bed of the ocean, in the course of every naval war, from the earliest times, our conceptions are greatly raised respecting the multiplicity of lasting memorials which man is leaving of his labours. During our last great struggle with France, thirty-two of our ships of the line went to the bottom in the course of twenty-two years, besides seven fifty-gun ships, eighty-six frigates, and a multitude of smaller vessels. The navies of the other Europen powers, France, Holland, Spain, and Denmark, were almost annihilated during the same period, so that the aggregate of their losses must have many times exceeded that of Great Britain. In every one of these ships were batteries of cannon, constructed of iron or brass, whereof a great number had the dates and places of their manufacture inscribed upon them in letters cast in metal. In each there were coins of copper, silver, and often many of gold, capable of serving as valuable histori-cal monuments; in each were an infinite variety of instruments of the arts of war and peace, many formed of materials, such as glass and earthenware, capable of lasting for indefinite ages, when once removed from the mechanical action of the waves, and buried under a mass of matter which may exclude the corroding action of the sea-water. But the reader must not imagine, that the fury of war is more conducive than the peaceful spirit of commercial enterprise to the accumulation of wrecked vessels in the bed of the sea. From an examination of Lloyd's lists, from the year 1793 to the commencement of 1829, it appeared, that the number of British vessels alone, lost during that period, amounted, on an average, to no less than one and a half daily, a greater number than we should have anticipated, although we learn, from Moreau's tables, that the number of merchant vessels employed at one time in the navigation of England and Scotland, amounts to about twenty thousand, having one with another, a mean burden of one hundred and twenty tons. Out of five hundred and fifty one ships of the royal navy, lost to the country during the period above mentioned, only one hundred and sixty were taken or destroyed by the enemy, the rest either stranded or foundered, or have been burned by accident; a striking proof, that the dangers of our naval warfare, however great, may be far exceeded by the storm, the hurricane, the shoal, and all the other perils of the deep. Millions of dollars and other coins have been sometimes submerged in a single ship, and on these, when they happen to be enveloped in a matrix, capable of protecting them from chemical changes, much information of historical interest will remain inscribed, and endure for periods as indefinite as have the delicate markings of zoophytes or lapidified plants in some of the ancient secondary rocks. In almost every large ship, moreover, there are some precious stones set in seals, and other articles of use and ornament, composed of the hardest substances in nature, on which letters and various images are carved; engravings |