auxiliary arts. It is
true that the salvage officer's ground, his main asset, is the knowledge
and ability to do a seamanlike 'job o' work' when the time and tide are
opportune; he must have a seaman's training in the ways of the wind and
the sea and be able properly to assess the weather conditions under
which alone his precarious work is possible. A scientist of a liberal
and versatile type (not perhaps exhaustive in his scope and range), he
is able to draw the quantum of his needs from a wide and varied summary.
Together with his medical exemplar, he has developed a technique from
crude remedies and imperfect diagnoses to application of fine science.
He must have a sure knowledge of the anatomy of his great steel
patients, be versed in the infinite variety and intricacy of ship
construction, and the valves and arteries of their power; be able to pen
and plan his formulae for weight-lifting--the stress and strain of it,
down to the calibre of the weakest link. A super-tidesman, he must know
to an inch the run of bottom, the swirl and eddy, the value of flood and
ebb and springs, for the tide--Canute's immutable recalcitrant--is his
greatest assistant, a familiar _Genius maris_ whom he conjures from the
deeps of ocean to do his bidding. Shrewd! He is a keen student of the
psychology of the distressed mariner; again, like the medical man, he
must set himself to extract truth from the tale that is told. His
treatment must be prescribed, not to meet a case as presented, but as
his skilled knowledge of the probabilities warrants. Tactful, if he is
to meet with assistance in his difficult work, he must assume the
sympathy of one seaman to another in distress. What, after all, does it
matter if he agree heartily that "the touch was very light, we were
going dead slow," when, from his divers' reports, he knows that the
whole bottom is 'up'?

In the handling of his own men there must be a combination of rigour and
reason. Salvage crews are a hardy, tempestuous race who have no ordinary
regard for the niceties of law and order; their work is no scheduled and
defined occupation with states and margins; they are servants to tide
and weather alone; they are embarked on a venture, on a hazard, a
lottery. To such men, administering, under his direction, the heroic but
destructive remedies of high explosive and compressed air, there cannot
be a normal allowance for the economic use of gear and material. He must
know the right and ju