Being quite satisfied with the result of this experiment, the hardy Professor, still balancing himself on his giddy height, to the wonder and amusement of the sailors, found that the calculations he had already made did not give him the actual velocity of the waves. A wave-crest certainly passed from stern to stem in six seconds, but then the ship was traveling in the same direction, at the rate of nine geographical miles per hour, or 15.2 feet per second; this rate the Professor added to the former measure, which gave 790.5 feet for the actual distance traversed by the wave in 16.5 seconds, being at the rate of 32.67 English miles per hour. This computation was afterward compared with calculations made from totally different data by Mr. Scott Russell, and found to be quite correct. With these facts the Professor scrambled from the larboard paddle-box of the Hibernia. He had also made some observations on the forms of waves. When the wind blows steadily from one point, they are generally regular; but when it is high and gusty, and shifts from point to point, the sea is broken up, and the waves take a more conical shape, and assume fantastical crests. While the sea ran high, the Professor observed now and then a ridge of waves extending from about a quarter to a third of a mile in length, forming, as it were, a rampart of water. This ridge was sometimes straight, and sometimes bent as of a crescent form, with the central mass of water higher than the rest, and not unfrequently with two or three semi-elliptical mounds in diminishing series on either side of the highest peak. When the wind had subsided, a few of the bolder passengers crawled upon deck in the oddest imaginable costumes. They had not much to encounter, for about a third part of the greater undulations averaged only twenty-four feet, from crest to hollow, in height. These higher waves could be seen and selected from the pigmy waves about them, at the distance of a quarter of a mile from the ship. The Professor had been very unpopular on board while the stormy weather lasted, and the ladies had vowed that he was a sarcastic creature, who _would_ have his little joke on the gravest calamities of life, but as the waves decreased in bulk, and the wind lulled, and the sun shone, and the men took off their oil-skin coats, and the cabin-windows were opened, the frowns of the fair voyagers wore off. Perfect good-will was general before the ship sighted Liverpool; and even the cook, as he prepared the last dinner for the passengers, was heard to declare (in confidence to one of the stokers) that, after all, there might be something worth knowing in the Professor's observations.