to maintain maritime efficiency; for when
by the seclusion act of 1624 all merchant vessels were destroyed, the
marine restricted to small fishing and coasting vessels, and intercourse
confined to Japan's narrow island world, the fisheries nevertheless kept
alive that intimacy with the sea and preserved the nautical efficiency
that was destined to be a decisive factor in the development of awakened
Japan.

[Sidenote: Anthropo-geographic importance of navigation.]

The resources of the sea first tempted man to trust himself to its
dangerous surface; but their rewards were slight in comparison with the
wealth of experiences and influences to which he fell heir, after he
learned to convert the barrier of the untrod waste into a highway for
his sail-borne keel. It is therefore true, as many anthropologists
maintain, that after the discovery of fire the next most important step
in the progress of the human race was the invention of the boat. No
other has had such far-reaching results. Since water covers
three-fourths of the earth's surface and permits the land-masses to rise
only as islands here and there, it presents to man for his nautical
ventures three times the area that he commands for his terrestrial
habitat. On every side, the break of the waves and the swell of the
tides block his wanderings, unless he has learned to make the water
carry him to his distant goal. Spacially, therefore, the problem and the
task of navigation is the most widespread and persistent in the history
of mankind. The numerous coaling-stations which England has scattered
over the world are mute witnesses to this spacial supremacy of the
water, to the length of ocean voyages, and the power of the ocean to
divide and unite. But had the proportion of land and water been
reversed, the world would have been poorer, deprived of all these
possibilities of segregation and differentiation, of stimulus to
exchange and far-reaching intercourse, and of ingenious inventions which
the isolating ocean has caused. Without this ramifying barrier between
the different branches of the human family, these would have resembled
each other more closely, but at the cost of development. The mere
multiplicity of races and sub-races has sharpened the struggle for
existence and endowed the survivors with higher qualities. But it was
navigation that released primitive man from the seclusion of his own
island or continent, stimulated and facilitated the intercourse of
pe