METHODS OF RESEARCH 11 



were published by the British Government in 

 fifty quarto volumes, and these have formed 

 the starting point for all subsequent deep-sea 

 investigations, and laid down the broad 

 general foundations of the modern science of 

 oceanography.^ 



During the past thirty years nearly every 

 civilised nation "has sent forth expeditions 

 to undertake deep-sea researches, and during 



*The term Thalassography has been used, largely in 

 the United States, to express the science which treats of 

 the ocean. The term Oceanography is, however, likely 

 to prevail. The Greeks appear to have used the word 

 Thalassa almost exclusively for the Mediterranean, 

 whereas the almost mythical " oceanus " of the ancients 

 corresponds to the ocean basins of the modem geographer. 

 In recent times I believe the word Oceanography was 

 introduced by myself about 1880, but I find from Murray's 

 English Dictionary that the word *' oceanographie " was 

 used in French in 1584, but did not then survive. 



The words Oceanography and Oceanology are not 

 " mongrel " words ; on the contrary, they are both 

 absolutely correct formations, on such analogies as 

 geography, topography, and theology, demonology, anthro- 

 pology, zoology. The Greek dictionary knows such a word 

 as thalassographos, but not oceanographos. But to insist 

 on this point would be the merest pedantry, for even 

 now it is not of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Seas that 

 we speak, but of the oceans bearing those names. 

 Sutherland Black says : "By thalassography the Greek 

 dictionary chiefly means the description of the Mediter- 

 ranean. A very myopic pedant might raise some scruple 

 over -graphy on the ground that a mythographer is a 

 * writer ' of myths, and a logographer a ' writer * of 

 prose ; but then a topographer is not a writer of places, 

 but a describer of them ; so also with geographer," 



