After leaving the “Golden Gate,” the entrance to the Bay of San Francisco, and passing the rocky Farralones, islands whence a company brings a million of sea‐birds’ eggs to the city yearly, the voyager by this route will not see land till Japan is reached. The steamships stop nowhere _en route_. The passengers must depend on their own resources aboard for amusement, and every passing sail becomes an object of greatest interest. Yet still there is always the sea itself, in its varying aspects of placid or turbulent grandeur. “The appearance of the open sea,” says Frédol, “far from the shore—the boundless ocean—is to the man who loves to create a world of his own, in which he can freely exercise his thoughts, filled with sublime ideas of the Infinite. His searching eye rests upon the far‐ distant horizon; he sees there the ocean and the heavens meeting in a vapoury outline, where the stars ascend and descend, appear and disappear in their turn. Presently this everlasting change in nature awakens in him a vague feeling of that sadness ‘which,’ says Humboldt, ‘lies at the root of all our heartfelt joys.’” When the Breton fisherman or mariner puts to sea, his touching prayer is, “_Keep me, my God! my boat is so small, and Thy ocean so wide!_” “We find in the sea,” says Lacepède, “unity and diversity, which constitute its beauty; grandeur and simplicity, which give it sublimity; puissance and immensity, which command our wonder.” That immense expanse of water is no mere liquid desert; it teems with life, however little that life may be visible. The inhabitants of the water through which the good ship ploughs her way are as numerous as those of the solid earth; although, unless the great sea‐serpent makes its fitful appearance, the experience of a traveller over the Pacific by this route will be repeated. Says he:—