A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury, U.S.N. and C.S.N. Compiled
by his Daughter, Diana Fontaine Maury Corbin. (Sampson Low and Co.)—The subject of this charmingly written memoir was born in 1806, entered the United States Navy as a Midshipman in 1825, and after a few cruises, settled down to the work of his life as an investigator of the physical geography of the sea, a branch of science which he may, indeed, be fairly said to have created. The publication of his " Wind and Current Charts " marked an epoch in the history of navigation, and their immediate effect was stated by a writer in Hunt's Merchant's Magazine in May, 1854, to have been the saving of two and a quarter millions of dollars per annum on a freightage of one million tons. In a report presented to Congress in January, 1855, it was declared that the voyage from New York to California, which before the publication of the charts had occupied, on an average, 180 days, now required only 136 days, and the length of the passage from Europe to Australia had been reduced from 124 to 97 days. These were great results for the world, but to Maury they only brought official disgrace and a reduction of his pay from three thousand to fifteen hundred dollars. Not a whit dis- couraged by this singular proof of Republican ingratitude, the great American hydrographer continued his investigations with unabated ardour, and shortly afterwards published his magnum opus, " The Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology," which Humboldt and Qnetelet justly characterised as " one of the most charming and instructive books in the English language." Such, indeed, it still is ; but some thirty years ago it possessed the additional attraction of a novelty in subject and method hardly inferior to that which a few years later gave a world-wide reputation to Darwin's great work. The value of his labours was amply recognised in Europe, learned Societies claimed the honour of his member- ship, orders of knighthood were offered him, medals were struck in his honour, and—to crown all—the venerable Humboldt declared that he had founded a new science. It was not merely to the meteorology of the sea that Maury devoted his time and intel- lect. When he had made the sea-ways safe and short for commerce, he turned his attention to the needs of agriculture, and was the first to lay down, if not the foundations, at least the principles upon which the foundations should be based, of that great and fruitful method of widely gathered weather intelligence and elaborate forecasts which to farmer and fisherman now render their industries infinitely more certain of results and free from peril than a few decades ago would have been thought possible. Commander Maury—the highest rank he attained in the Navy of his own country, grudgingly bestowed after nearly forty years' service, was the grade below a post-captaincy—came of sturdy Huguenot forefathers, driven from France in the early part of the eighteenth century by the dragonnades of Louvois. His grandfather was an Episcopal clergyman of Virginia; and among the pupils whose education he was charged with, three became Presidents of the United States, and five ap- pended their names to the Declaration of Independence. His grandmother was of similar Huguenot origin, but on his mother's side a stream of English blood was blended with the Huguenot strain. Maury was what the descendant of such an ancestry should be,—an indefatigable worker and thinker, and actuated in all his acts and thoughts by a dominant and profound sense of moral and religious duty. He did all that lay in his power to avert the Civil War; but when it broke out, he con- ceived that loyalty to his State necessitated his abandonment of the Union,—a fatal mistake, which should be a warning to those who would impose upon good men the difficulties and
dangers of a double allegiance. After the war, he joined Marmilian in Mexico, where he busied himself with schemes for encouraging immigration, and, with greater profit to the country, :ntroduced the cultivation of the cinchona-tree. In 1866 he came to England, but in 1888, after declining the Directorship of the Observatory offered by the Emperor of .the Preach, he accepted the Chair of Physics at the Military College of his beloved State, and took up his abode at Lexington. There he died in 1873, at the age of sixty-seven, after a life of high and noble usefulness, unflecked by a single stain, and scarcely shadowed by an error of judgment which was the outcome of a patriotism not too intense, but too contracted.
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