PREFACE 



This is not a textbook of Oceanography. The compre- 

 hensive textbook, drawing contributions from various 

 branches of science — ranging from astronomy to biology — 

 has still to be written, and possibly the time to write such 

 an encyclopaedic work on the sea has not yet come. But 

 it is not too soon to let the young university student, and 

 the intelligent public in general, know that the oceans 

 present wonderful phenomena and profoundly interesting 

 problems to the observer and the investigator, and that a 

 science of the sea having its roots in the remote past has 

 of recent years developed greatly and is now growing fast 

 into an organized body of interrelated knowledge. 



I have myself lived through the period that has seen 

 the development of the Natural History of the Sea into the 

 Science of Oceanography, and have known intimately 

 most of the men who did the pioneer work. There can be 

 but few others now living who have worked, as I did, along 

 with Wyville Thomson and John Murray in Edinburgh 

 more than forty years ago, and that is my justification 

 for the introduction in the earlier chapters of some personal 

 impressions of these and other nineteenth- century oceano- 

 graphers. And even in regard to that earlier pioneer 

 Edward Forbes, although I could not have known him 

 personally as he died several years before I was born, still 

 in my boyhood and early youth in Edinburgh some of his 

 old friends, realizing my keen interest in the subject, talked 

 to me of their lost hero, his ways and his work. So that 

 I almost came to believe that I also had known him and 



