Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
The Whole delivered in a plain Language, and founded on a long and successful Experience.
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
LONDON: PRINTED FOR EDWARD AND CHARLES DILLY.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
If we consider the many benefits that navigation contributes to commerce in general, and how much the prosperity of nations are indebted to its source, we must without hesitation declare seamen, a most respectable part of mankind; and if we reflect a moment, on the many hazards and perils they are exposed to on that precarious element, and the advantages we reap from their toil, the common feelings of human society, must awake and remind us, not only how much we are obliged as social members, even from a motive of self interest, to study their preservation, but as fellow creatures, how forcibly our duty calls us to give them every aid in our power, and to lighten the burthen of their many toils.
A ship at sea may be considered as a floating kingdom; and the subjects, however few in number, are not only liable to the same accidents as those on shore, but to many more, peculiar to that precarious and fluctuating element that surrounds them. For this reason there are many things requisite to be known by the mariners besides the art of conducting a ship from port to port.
Of all the various knowledges that distinguish the human species from the brute creation, what is of more value than that which tends to the preservation of life and health? I believe that every man who is actuated by motives of philanthropy will with me wish, that mankind in general would advert more to it in the principles of education, than what they at present do. Indeed it is astonishing that so valuable an acquisition, as to have some knowledge of the body we possess, and its preservation, should be so totally neglected, as to be entirely excluded from education; an acquisition that not only enlivens the mind, but in itself is so very essential to our existence; yet what is more to be wondered at, is, that a seaman who launches into the main ocean, is cut off from every assistance, in case of an accident or sickness, and rendered wholly unable to give the least aid to himself, or those who are entrusted to his care. Large ships I own are exempt from this observation: but are not the lives of men on board of small ships equally as valuable, and worth preserving, as those of greater burthen?