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Navigation and Hydrography, Oceanography's Eyes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2011
Extract
Writing in 1623, Samuel Purchas declaimed, in Purchas his Pilgrimes, ‘The Sea yields the world to the world, by this art of arts Navigation’. In those days navigation and its handmaid hydrography were, indeed, each more of an art than a science, though the British had made great progress in the preceding 50 years towards making them scientific. I have taken as my thesis today that it was not until these two positionfinding ‘arts’ had become thoroughly scientific that there could be a science of oceanography. So I have called navigation and hydrography oceanography's eyes, for they enable the oceanographer to know where he is in the ocean and where phenomena occur in the ocean, both prerequisites to the observation, collection and organisation of positive knowledge about the seas and the oceans, which I take to be the basis of scientific oceanography.
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- Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1972