Genoa's buildings-an impression borne out, whether he explores uphill or down.

Since the day, more than four and a half centuries ago, when the naïvely named "New Street" and "Newest Street" came into being, Genoa has climbed steadily up her hills, each generation contributing edifices on a higher level. Builders of the 18th century left their solid private residences, and those of the 19th and 20th their even solider apartment houses-almost palaces themselves, in all but name and interior arrangement.

GENOA STILL BUILDS STANCHLY AS OF OLD

Up to newest Genoa of to-day tram lines run with many a snaky fold, as they loop inward across ravines and outward around hilly buttresses, passing balustraded terraces and staggered flights of steps. Beside the folds of steel runs one of the city's scenic roads, "The Way of the Circumvallation on the Mountain," and over it the visitor's taxi pants as it lifts him above the city.

The buildings become fewer. There, its thick walls encased by the tied scaffolding of Italy, is a half-completed structure. Genoa is carrying on, one notes,

carrying on in the stanchness of her construction as well as in the conquest of her hills.

Soon the entire city lies revealed. It is then that one realizes the full force of Genoa's title The Superb. Behind as a background rise the green Ligurian hills, the nearer crests capped with the fortresses placed there by the Republic. In front a great amphitheater slopes down to the sea. Roads and streets are its aisles; the great blocks of its palaces and other buildings form the gigantic seats; domes and towers are the ornaments of its boxes of state. And below the lowest slope, its unruffled waters catching the light, lies the harbor, a perfect stage for this city of the sea. SOME OF HISTORY'S GREATEST FIGURES

APPEARED ON GENOA'S STAGE

What pageants and spectacles and stirring incidents that stage has held!

The Carthaginians are coming! They pass, and the city lies in ruins.

The Saracens are victorious, and in chains the flower of Genoa leaves the loved shore for lives of slavery.

Clouds of incense rise; gorgeously robed prelates give their blessings; a Gen

oese fleet sails off to the Crusades. It returns laden with sacred relics and rich treasure from the East.

A ship of ill omen puts in. It has brought the Great Plague to Europe; through it millions will die. Galleys bring the stones of a demolished monastery from Constantinople, a monastery built by Genoa's hated rivals, the Venetians. And from those alien stones rises the Republic's bulwark, the Palace of San Giorgio.

Richard the Lion-Hearted steps ashore and is acclaimed. After him, through the centuries, comes a long line of world figures-admirals, kings, emperors, popes, fêted guests of the Republic.

Sorrowfully the remnant of a defeated fleet puts in. The battle has gone to Pisa or to Venice. But yonder are galleys of victory! The city goes wild at the news of Genoa's defeat of Venice in 1298. In the harbor the vanquished Venetian admiral, chained to a mast, beats out his brains. A strange figure, Marco Polo, is led ashore to be cast into prison, there to write his marvelous narrative.

Triumphant galleys sail in, bearing Gargantuan iron links. It is the fleet that has finally humbled Pisa and bears as a trophy of its victory the great chain which the rival city had placed across its harbor.

We see in fancy another day.

Sunshine bathes a peaceful, busy harbor. It is a great day for Genoa, but she knows it not.

A caravel is sailing, and on it a lad of fourteen years, his heart beating with excitement, is beginning his first voyage as a sailor.

Why should Genoa take notice? Has she not sent tens of thousands of her young men to the life-and death of the sea? It is nothing, save perhaps to the wool-weaver Domenico and his wife Su

sanna.

Is it not to be expected? One more boy of Genoa, who has played about her quays, who has stood on her hills and gazed wistfully over the watery horizon-just one more has taken the inevitable step.

Young Christoforo Colombo is putting out to sea.

B

ELOW me was the beach where

Crusoe found Friday's tracks in the sand. At the water's edge a Chilean fisherman tinkered with the engine of his motorboat. From where I sat, in front of the cave, I could gaze far over the sea-that same empty sea that Robinson Crusoe watched through the years, waiting a friendly sail.

About the cave itself, where Crusoe talked with his cats, his pet kids, and his parrot, and where he kept his guns, tools, and sea chests saved from the wreck, the ground was strewn with pie crust, paper napkins, and picnic litter; for yesterday a party of Valparaiso tourists had swarmed ashore to see the island in a day.

IDLERS DRESS AS CRUSOE AND FRIDAY TO AMUSE TOURISTS

When this tourist boat steams in two island idlers garb themselves as Crusoe and Friday. One wears a peaked goathair cap and carries a parrot and a clumsy umbrella. The other, as scantily clad as Friday was, poles their rude raft around the ship, as they seek to amuse the restless trippers and gather a few tips (page 356). Such is the power of good printed words. In every tongue from Japanese to Scandinavian, millions read Crusoe and Friday. Even after 200 years, Defoe's great book is still perhaps as widely known as any other, excepting always the Bible. Weeks before, I had left the coast of Chile to visit Robinson Crusoe's hermit home, that romantic bit of rock and earth that lifts its green head from the Pacific, 365 miles west of Valparaiso. But no ocean greyhound, no crack tourist liner, carried me. I came to Juan Fernández Island much as Crusoe came, in a 60-ton windjammer.

As our stubby, dripping nose smashed the howling seas, I wondered why this mad ocean was ever called pacific. The only other passenger was a Chilean lady. Between fellow travelers, however, no merry quip and jest now, no cards or music on moonlit decks. Society and sea

sickness do not mix, especially in a 10 x 12 "saloon," with bunks built parallel with the dining table. Although I read Spanish, I speak it as a Russian might recite "Hiawatha." So between us, now and then, we exchanged remarks scribbled on bits of paper sack. The lady's husband, once governor of Easter Island, had been lost at sea. She, also, was bound for Crusoe's Island, to visit relatives engaged in the lobster fishery.

Only twice was our tedious trip broken by excitement, and the skipper's foghorn voice raised to battle pitch. That was

when he found extraneous matter in his tea, and again when we hit a whale.

It's an odd fact that no marine creature likes to have a boat pass him. This whale not only swam ahead of us, but tried to right-angle across our bow. Down on him we crashed just as we slipped over a big sea, hitting him a frightful blow that rocked him from snout to tail. He snorted like a freight engine grunting in an effort to start a long train; then up he came in our wake, spouted a geyser blast of water and spray, and sank to rest his back.

By profession I am a student of Nature. and specialize in marine life. Pondering such piscatorial problems as whether shrimp make good mothers, how flying fish make a landing without crashing, and what the well-bred crab should eat for lunch might be thought the limit of imagination for a man whose life is spent prying into the diet, distribution, and habits of marine invertebrates.

Nevertheless, not even a shrimp hunter can sail these southern seas, where romance and adventure never die, without finding far more to think about, for example, than why some fish mothers carry their eggs in their gill cavities and others don't.

DAYDREAMING OF BUCCANEER AND SEA

ROVER

On less stormy days I lay on a coil of rope up forward and watched the cloud world skim over. Prying all thoughts of

shrimp and crabs from mind, I daydreamed of Balboa, Magellan, Cook, who passed this way to die. And of the Golden Hind and dare-devil Drake. Through these very waters went the English rovers, sacking Spanish towns along the restless coast. Food, goods, gold they stole from the Dons, and then away.

And Manila ships! How many an early London fortune was founded on silk and pieces of eight robbed from Acapulcobound galleons! For pirates, after all, were the fathers of ocean trade. They learned sea paths, the best sailing routes, located the richest islands and the tribes with things Europe could use.

Into this same then unknown sea of 70,000,000 square miles pushed also the bold Dutch and Spanish sea gypsies, twisting their unwieldy wooden craft through tropic hurricanes. Often half their crews were down or dead of hunger and scurvy. Yet they discovered new lands and fought their way ashore against spears and arrows. To far New Zealand they ventured, to the Solomons, through all Polynesia. Often a big island, or even a whole archipelago, would be found, only to be lost again for years, and rediscovered by another adventurer.

Then the whalers-seven hundred and thirty-five Yankee ships in one year cutting blue water from Crusoe's Isle up to the Aleutians. Pirates, whalers, sailors, scientists, tourists-that is the sequence in Pacific conquest. Darwin on the Beagle; Moseley on the Challenger; Americans on the Albatross; and the deep-sea workers dragging the ocean's bottom, hunting the best place to lay cables.

Later, ukuleles, hula skirts, Kanaka songs, and South Sea scenes for motionpicture melodramas, all a part of the romantic Pacific picture.

But I am a scientist, not a romanticist. My business is fish. The Smithsonian. didn't send me 8,000 miles just to lie on deck and dream. So, as the sea quieted a bit, I got out my dragnet and threw it over our stern to search out the life below.

Diminutive denizens of the deep I drew in and pickled in bottles, numbered and labeled, after the manner of my kind; then dropped my drag for more of ocean's tiny life.

LUMINOUS SEA LIFE AT ITS BEST

Marine fireworks one might call the phosphorescence of the sea. In all my specimen hunts, from Alaska to the Ant