78 Daniel and Mary Merriman 



i 



the globe, and carrying on deep-sea and other investigations in many regions of the 

 ocean, the Challenger returned to England in May 1876, and the crew was paid off 

 after the ship had been in commission for over three years and seven months ". Then 

 came the question of how best to work up and publish the results. Quantities of data 

 in all branches of oceanography had been recorded, and the collections, which had 

 been sent back to England from the expedition's different ports of call or brought 

 back on ship-board, were wonderful in their extent and variety. There was extensive 

 correspondence, in which members of the Royal Society, the Admiralty, the British 

 Museum, and the Treasury all had a hand. Murray {he. cit.) again writes, " It was 

 further determined that the records of the various observations and marine collections 

 should remain in the meantime in the hands of those who had taken part in the 

 Expedition, and that a temporary Government department, with a small annual 

 grant, should be created, the duty of which should be to direct the discussion of the 

 physical and biological observations, the examination of the collections, and the 

 publication of the scientific results, so far as these had a bearing on the science o 

 Oceanography ". Her Majesty's Stationery Office was to publish the results, and the 

 " typical collections " were eventually to be deposited in the British Museum. In 

 1877 Wyville Thomson was appointed Director of the Challenger Expedition Com- 

 mission, with headquarters in Edinburgh and John Murray as first assistant. Wyville 

 Thomson fell into ill health shortly thereafter, and he lived only five more years — to 

 the age of 52. In that time he settled the style of the publications and sent " a consider- 

 able part " of the collections to the specialists* who were to examine and describe 

 them. In fact, by 1882, the year of his death, 22 of the Challenger Memoirs were in 

 print, the first having appeared in 1880. It remained for Murray to see the job 

 through; the last of the " Fifty large Royal Quarto Volumes " appeared in 1895. 



Thomson's letters to GuNXHERf resulted in three memoirs: on the shore fishes 

 (1880), on the deep-sea fishes (1887), and on the pelagic fishes (1889). The corre- 

 spondence, not all included here and in a most unhappy long-hand, provides fair 

 evidence of the tremendous pains to which Sir Wyville went, of his attention to detail, 

 of his ability to prod the contributors to the Challenger Reports when occasion 

 demanded, and of his insatiable desire to see the whole series done to the highest 

 degree of perfection. 



University — Edinburgh 

 March 17, 1877 

 Dear Dr. Giinther: 



We have now gone over the greater part of the " Challenger " spirit collections and the Fishes 

 are nearly ready to be handed over to you if you are inclined to take them up. 



There are two distinct sets — those from the shallow water and from the marshes. This col- 

 lection is not large as such a collection might easily be made with more time but I have no 

 doubt there are many undescribed forms from the more remote places. 



The other set is from deep water and many consist of a couple of hundred specimens (more or 

 less) of forty or fifty species of which a large proportion are undescribed. They are mostly 

 allied to the deep-water things which have come home from about Madeira. 



* The completed Challenger Reports contain contributions from 76 authors. 



t Published with the permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. We here express our best 

 thanks to the several persons who helped us with the original letters of C. Wyville Thomson in the 

 B.M.N. H., particularly Mr. Mugford of the Mineralogical Department Library. 



