114 THE OCEAN FLOOR 



Forty years ago when I was a young student working 

 under Sir William Ramsay in University College, Lon- 

 don, I was taken on a short cruise in the North Sea with 

 Sir John Murray, who there invited me to come over to 

 the "Challenger" office in Edinburgh and work up his 

 deep-sea sediment samples for radium. Pressure of 

 other projects prevented me from taking advantage of 

 this offer. Ten years later Sir John had passed away, 

 but another leader in oceanography, Prince Albert I of 

 Monaco, invited me to his Musee Oceanographique in 

 Monaco to work on the collections of deep-sea sedi- 

 ments kept there. 



Several years of work, first in Monaco, then in the 

 Institut fur Radiumforschung in Vienna, and finally in 

 Goteborg, enabled me to confirm several cases of out- 

 standingly high percentages of radium, like those found 

 by Joly. Joly's first explanation for the origin of deep- 

 sea radium, namely a chemical precipitation of that 

 element as sulphate from ocean water, I could not, 

 however, endorse. A second explanation, also pro- 

 pounded by Joly, that deep-sea radium is "uranium 

 supported" and due to a relatively .high concentration 

 of uranium in abyssal depths, has also proved er- 

 roneous. 



It took several years of teamwork with specialists 

 from Austria and Scandinavia before a satisfactory 

 explanation of the mysterious occurrence of deep-sea 

 radium could be evolved. First, we proved that sea 

 water is relatively poor in radium but instead contains 



