RECENT OCEANOGRAPHIC RESEARCHES.! 
By Cu. Gravikr, Sc. D. 
iB 
From cruises far and wide across the seas, especially during the 
nineteenth century, sailors and travelers brought back large collec- 
tions of many varieties of animals and plants. To the explorations 
by Dumont d’Urville, du Petit-Thouars, Péron and Lesueur, Quoy 
and Gaimard, Hombron and Jacquinot, and others, the Muséum 
d'Histoire Naturelle owes the great number of original types which 
make up its rich collections. The marine organisms collected by 
them were taken, for the most part at least, either between tides 
or in surface waters, without special appliances. 
The cruise of the Challenger around the world (1873-1876) marks 
an important date in this class of scientific explorations. Not con-. 
tent with the accumulation of a mass of material for zoological study, 
they also made observations on the conditions of the environment 
in which the captured animals lived. The nature of the sea bottoms 
was studied; the depths and the temperatures of the sea waters along 
the course were recorded. This was the beginning of a new branch 
of the science of oceanography, which has in the years succeeding 
undergone great development. 
This was also the beginning of a series of explorations conceived in 
the same spirit and undertaken by different countries: The T'ra- 
vailleur and the Talisman in France, the National and the Valdivia 
in Germany, the Siboga in Holland, the Investigator in India, the 
Blake and the Albatross in the United States, and others, without 
taking into account the numerous expeditions which traversed the 
Arctic Seas and those which penetrated the Antarctic Ocean. 
Special mention is due the cruises of the Prince of Monaco in the 
Atlantic Ocean and in the region of Spitzbergen. 
18 
It is, however, only at a very recent date that the methods of 
oceanographic investigation have been fixed and systematized. It 
was, to be exact, in 1902 that the nations bordering upon the North 
1 Translated by permission from Revue Scientifique, Paris, May 30, 1914. 
73176°—sM 191423 353 
