JOHN MURRAY 75 



the " Challenger " Office. Murray, as First Assistant on the 

 Staff, had charge of the office and the collections, and wel- 

 comed a few eager young workers who were wiUing to devote 

 free afternoons to helping in the multifarious work always in 

 progress. 



There we first made acquaintance with the celebrated 

 new deep-sea " oozes," learnt to distinguish them under the 

 microscope, and how to demonstrate the silicious Radiolaria 

 hidden in the calcareous Globigerina ooze ; and there we 

 first saw such wonders of the deep as Holoj^us and Cephalo- 

 discus, and the extraordinary new abyssal Holothurians, 

 afterwards known as Elasipoda. These — now the common- 

 places of marine biology — were then revelations, and those 

 of us who witnessed the discoveries in-the-making will always 

 associate them with " Challenger Murray " as the arch- 

 magician of the laboratory — a sort of modern scientific 

 alchemist, bringing mysterious unknown things out of store- 

 bottles, and then showing us how to demonstrate their true 

 nature. I am afraid that we who are trying to inspire 

 students with the sacred fire at the present day have no such 

 wonders to show as those first-fruits in the early days of 

 deep-sea research. Then between times, while waiting for 

 a reaction, or after work, Murray would tell us stories of the 

 great expedition — how the first living Globigerina (Hastigerina 

 murrayi), seen in all its glory of vesicular protoplasm expanded 

 far beyond its tiny shell, was picked up in a teaspoon from a 

 small boat during a dead calm in mid-ocean ; and how the 

 naval officers wrote their names with their fingers in letters 

 of fire on the phosphorescing giant Pyrosoma (over four feet 

 long) as it lay on the deck at night ; how they " iced " their 

 champagne in the tropics by plunging the bottles into the 

 trawKul of ooze just brought up from the abyss, and still 

 retaining its abyssal low temperature ; and, finally, he would 

 sing us a most amusing song — we never knew whether he 

 had invented it or not — about a Chinaman eating a little 

 white dog. 



