74 FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY 



he induced the British Government to annex this lonely, 

 uninhabited volcanic island, and to give a concession to work 

 the deposits to a company which he formed. He sent out 

 scientific investigators to study and report on the products, 

 and the results have been highly successful on both the 

 scientific and the commercial sides. Sir John Murray visited 

 Christmas Island himself on several occasions, he had roads 

 cleared, a railway constructed, waterworks established, piers 

 built, and the necessary buildings erected. In fact, the 

 lonely island was colonized by about 1,500 inhabitants, and 

 flourishing plantations of various kinds were established in 

 addition to the working of the phosphatic deposits. Murray 

 was able to show that some years before the war the British 

 Treasury had already received in royalties and taxes from 

 the island considerably more than the total cost of the 

 " Challenger " expedition. This is one of these cases where 

 a purely scientific investigation has led directly to great 

 wealth — wealth, it may be added, which in this case has 

 been used to a great extent for the advancement of science. 



In the case of Sir John Murray, as in that of Sir Wyville 

 Thomson, I am writing of a man who made a strong personal 

 impression as one of my teachers in science at Edinburgh 

 some forty-five years ago. It is not from one's formal 

 instructors alone that one learns. Murray was never on the 

 teaching staff of the university ; but a few of us (generally 

 Major-General Sir David Bruce, now of the Lister Institute, 

 Professor Noel-Paton, now of Glasgow, and myself), who 

 were then, in the late seventies, young students of science, 

 and were privileged to have the run of the " Challenger " 

 Office, learned more of practical Natural History from John 

 Murray than we did from many university lectures. 



This was in the few years following on the return of the 

 " Challenger " expedition in 1876, and the vast collections 

 of all kinds brought back from all the seas and remote 

 islands were being classified and sorted out into groups for 

 further examination in a house near the university, known as 



