Excerpt: ...twelve minutes, on the average, day and night during the eight months of open navigation. Nor are they small sailing vessels of a few tons' burden, but great sailless, steam-propelled hulks, carrying from five to ten thousand tons. So it is no fleet of graceful galleons-half bird, half lion, as the Griffin was-that have followed in her wake up what Hennepin called "the vast and unknown seas of which even the savages knew not the end." They have, in the evolution of nautical zoology, lost beak, wings, and ...
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Excerpt: ...twelve minutes, on the average, day and night during the eight months of open navigation. Nor are they small sailing vessels of a few tons' burden, but great sailless, steam-propelled hulks, carrying from five to ten thousand tons. So it is no fleet of graceful galleons-half bird, half lion, as the Griffin was-that have followed in her wake up what Hennepin called "the vast and unknown seas of which even the savages knew not the end." They have, in the evolution of nautical zoology, lost beak, wings, and feathers, and now like a shoal of wet lions, tawny and black, their powerful heads and long steel backs just visible above the blue water, they course the western Mediterranean from spring to winter. Footnote: It is an intruding and probably whimsical, but fascinating, thought that the wings of the griffin have become evolved into the air-ships which first began successfully to fly, in America, near the shores of the lake on which the Griffin itself was hatched. The Wright brothers were born near one of those lakes. It is not a far-fetched or labored thought which pictures that simple, rough-made galleon-very like the model of the ship on the shield of Paris-as leading two broods across the valley above the Falls, one of lions that cannot fly and one of sea-birds, hydroplanes, whose paths are the air, but whose resting-places are the calm water; the brood of the sea and the brood of the sky, hatched from one nest at the water's edge. The ships of the lion brood are, some of them, five or six hundred feet in length, and carry eleven thousand tons of cargo. I have seen the skeleton of one of these iron-boned beasts, and I have been told that eight hundred thousand rivets go into its creation. And upon hearing this I could not but hear the deafening clamor caused by La Salle's driving the first nail or bolt, Father Hennepin declining the honor because of the "modesty of his religious profession." As to the cargoes that these ships bring back, ...
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