The same year Maury turned again to the “Commercial Prospects of the South”, which he made the subject of an address before the Virginia Mercantile Convention at Richmond. In this he called attention to what might have happened if Norfolk had become the terminus of a French line of steam packets to Havre, as he had suggested some dozen years before. Now, he said, the South must look toward the south; in view of the importance of “our Mediterranean” into which big rivers flow that are the arteries of much commerce, and because of the potential riches of the Amazon which will be vastly increased by the construction of a canal or railroad across the Isthmus, a line of steamers from Norfolk, Charleston, or Savannah to the mouth of the Amazon should at once be established. This enterprise, together with the need for building railroads in the South, was constantly in Maury’s mind and often became a subject of correspondence down to the beginning of the Civil War. Maury seems to have become almost as ready a speaker as he was a writer, and as his fame grew he was frequently called upon to speak on scientific questions and large problems of a commercial nature. In 1846, he addressed the Philodemic Society at the commencement exercises of Georgetown College in Washington. In the course of his speech he lauded the study of science in this fashion: “Beauties far more lovely, poetry far more sublime, lessons inexpressibly more eloquent and instructive than any which the classic lore of ancient Greece or Rome ever afforded are now to be seen and gathered in the walks of science”. In 1855 he spoke to the Jefferson and Washington Literary Societies of the University of Virginia, beginning with what he referred to as “sailing directions”. “There are some here”, he declared, “who though not seamen are nevertheless about to become masters of their own acts, and who are about to try the voyage of life upon a troubled sea. I have been some little time on that voyage; and it is so that, whenever I see a young man relying upon his own resources and setting out alone upon this long voyage, my heart warms towards him. I always desire to range up alongside of him, to speak to him kindly, and whisper words of encouragement in his ear”.