38 FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY 



living things inhabit the greatest depths of the ocean. It 

 may seem to some readers that Forbes lived very long ago, in 

 a remote period of last century, but Wy ville Thomson bridges 

 over the gap to our time. He knew Edward Forbes, and I 

 was fortunate enough to be the student, and later on assistant, 

 of Sir Wyville Thomson. It is then, as will be realized, a 

 peculiar satisfaction to me to make known to a younger 

 generation of marine biologists what I am able to recollect 

 or recover as to the life-work of my respected master, and 

 as to the part he played in that great development of 

 oceanography as a science which characterized the latter 

 part of the nineteenth century. 



Charles Wyville Thomson was born on March 5, 1830, 

 at his ancestral country house of Bonsyde, within sight of 

 the famous loch and ruined royal palace of Linlithgow, and 

 not far from the shores of the Firth of Forth. His family 

 had been connected with Edinburgh and the neighbourhood 

 for generations, his great-grandfather, for example, being a 

 law officer of the Crown at the time of the Jacobite rising 

 in 1745. He was educated at Merchiston Castle School, 

 formerly the home of Napier the inventor of logarithms, and, 

 as in the case of some other men of science, his favourite 

 study at school was, we are told, the Latin poets. We are 

 apt to forget that in these cases there was probably no science 

 taught in the school, and no opportunity given to the boy 

 of studying anything more interesting than the Odes of 

 Horace. 



At the age of sixteen he matriculated as a student of 

 medicine in the University of Edinburgh, but his main inter- 

 ests were said to be zoology, botany, and geology, and he 

 was suspected of sometimes wandering as an observer and 

 collector of marine invertebrates along the prolific shores of 

 the Firth, when he ought, according to rules and regulations, 

 to have been engaged with lectures and textbooks. Like 

 many of the more intelligent students of science in Edinburgh, 

 both at that time and later, he joined the Royal Physical 



