Oceanography: its Scope, Problems, and Economic Importance

Abstract

IT is barely sixty years since H.M.S. Challenger, by her exploratory voyages round the world, built the foundations upon which the modern science of oceanography has grown up. For centuries man had roamed the seas and charted their boundaries, looking for new land or trade routes rather than for a knowledge of the sea itself. Exploration showed that less than one-third of the earth's surface is dry land; now that most of this has been mapped, attention is being turned more and more to the remaining two-thirds, which forms a world of its own, and by the very reason of its vastness holds the key to many of the secrets of land phenomena.

Oceanography: its Scope, Problems, and Economic Importance.

By Henry B. Bigelow. Pp. vii + 263. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.; London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1931.) 12s. 6d. net.