JOHN MURRAY 71 



bringing the noses of the two largest dogs together. Pande- 

 monium was the result. Each dog believed he had been 

 bitten by the other. They fought, chairs and tables were 

 overturned, and much of the apparatus broken. In the 

 future, I was requested to turn my attention to the observa- 

 tional sciences of botany, zoology, and geology." 



He then spent some years, in the sixties, at the University 

 of Edinburgh, where he was known as a " chronic " student, 

 working at the subjects in which he was interested without 

 following any definite course. Amongst the professors under 

 whom he studied at that time, and who became his close 

 friends in later Hfe, were P. G. Tait in physics, Crum Brown 

 in chemistry, Turner in anatomy and Archibald Geikie in 

 geology. A decade or so later, after the return of the 

 " Challenger " expedition, he became once more a student at 

 the University of Edinburgh, and that was when I had the 

 good fortune first to meet him. 



In 1868 he visited Spitzbergen and Jan Mayen and other 

 parts of the Arctic regions on board a Peterhead whaler, on 

 which, on the strength of having once been a medical student, 

 he was shipped as surgeon. This voyage of seven months 

 probably did much to confirm that interest in the phenomena 

 and problems of the ocean which had been first aroused 

 on his passage home from Canada, ten years before. This 

 interest was doubtless further stimulated during the imme- 

 diately following years by the epoch-making results of the 

 pioneer deep-sea expeditions in the " Lightning " and 

 " Porcupine," then exploring, under the direction of Wyville 

 Thomson, Carpenter, and Gwyn Jeffreys, the Atlantic coasts 

 of Europe. And then, fortunately, in 1870, Wyville Thom- 

 son was appointed professor at Edinburgh, which now 

 became the centre of the negotiations and arrangements 

 with the Admiralty and the Royal Society that led eventually, 

 in 1872, to the equipment and despatch of our great British 

 Deep-sea Exploring Expedition. 



It was only an odd chance that [led to Murray's connection 



