Few ideas could be more fascinating than that of hauling up gold and silver from the bottom of the sea, and it is this same fascination, with all the excitement it brings in its train, which lures men on to attempt to wrest many of these long-lost treasures from the recesses of the ocean. Years sometimes are spent in pondering ancient documents, hunting for evidence of the exact locality of the vanished treasure, seeking to sift rumour from actual fact. Further years may be spent in making plans and special apparatus for lifting the treasure, and, when the hunter starts in real earnest, he finds at last that he has spent years of his life and thousands of pounds just for the privilege of stirring up the seabed. Treasure-hunting is, in fact, something like taking a ticket for a sweepstake. The chances may be ridiculously small, but the prospect of winning a fortune will always make the game popular. Fate, indeed, seems to delight in playing tricks on salvage men. While, on the one hand, it sometimes leads them on to fit out ambitious expeditions costing thousands of pounds, sends them journeying afar and imposes the greatest hardships upon them without bringing them any reward whatsoever; on the other hand, it sometimes flings a fortune straight into the lap of some lucky man when he is least expecting it. Lord Leverhulme, in illustrating the vagaries of Fate, related how an Australian firm once owned an island in the Pacific, a rocky little place with a few coco-nut trees that gave their crop of nuts which were duly dried in the sun and turned into copra and coco-nut oil. Their trading schooner used to visit the island to load the copra, and on one of the trips the captain happened to pick up a piece of rock and put it aboard the ship. In due course that piece of rock went back to Australia with the copra, and was used in the office to keep the door open when the weather was sultry. The firm acquired their island to make money out of it, but although the coco-nut trees brought them a profit, they certainly did not bring them a fortune. The question arose as to whether it was worth their while retaining the island, and after due consideration they sold their property to some one else, and thought no more about it. Entering their office one day, a professor from the university chanced to kick against the stone that was propping the door open. He stooped down, picked it up, scrutinized it closely for a minute or two. “Where did you get this?” he demanded. “Oh, that’s a bit of rock our skipper brought back from one of our islands,” was the reply. The professor looked at the rock again. “Do you know what it is?” he asked. “Just a bit of stone,” came the answer. “I don’t know,” said the professor, “but I think it’s phosphate. I’d like to take it away and analyse it, if you’ll allow me.”