INTRODUCTORY 9 



scientific dredging in shallow water round the coasts. Forbes 

 was the type of a whole series of men who did notable pioneer 

 work in marine biology during the middle part of last century, 

 and produced authoritative books and monographs which 

 mark a great advance in knowledge of the natural history 

 of the British seas. Many of these men were amateurs of 

 science who had other professions ; but Forbes was not. 

 He was all his life a hard-working professional teacher of 

 the natural sciences, but he did much to inspire and encourage 

 these other workers of his day — especially in the use of the 

 dredge as an instrument of research. 



The " dredge " of science is a modification of the fisher- 

 man's oyster-dredge, and the Italians Donati and Marsigh 

 used some such simple contrivance for bringing up material 

 from the sea-bottom in the Mediterranean before the middle 

 of the eighteenth century. 



The use of the naturalist's dredge (introduced to science 

 by 0. F. Miiller, the Dane, in 1799) for exploring the sea- 

 bottom was brought into prominence almost simultaneously 

 in several countries of North-west Europe — by Henri Milne- 

 Edwards in France in 1830, by Michael Sars in Norway in 

 1835, and in our own country by Edward Forbes about 1832. 

 The last-named genial and many-sided genius was a man of 

 Scottish descent, who was born rather more than a hundred 

 years ago, and died in 1854, when not yet forty years of age. 

 He produced an extraordinary amount of first-rate work in 

 his short life, and inspired advances in oceanography which 

 he did not live to see carried out. As a result of observations 

 in the Eastern Mediterranean, he published a hst of " zones " 

 of marine life, much of which is still accepted, though his 

 supposed " azoic " zone at 300 fathoms was shown by 

 WyviUe Thomson and others to be a mistake. Forbes's 

 theories on distribution and on the origin of the British 

 fauna and flora, even if in part erroneous, have had an 

 important position and influence in the history of science, 

 and have led up to the very researches which resulted in more 



