JOHN IVIURRAY 85 



graphical Societies; he helped to establish the Observatory on 

 the summit of Ben Nevis ; and in 1884, along with his friend, 

 Robert Irvine, of Caroline Park, on the shores of the Firth of 

 Forth, he acquired the lease of an old sandstone quarry near 

 Granton, into which the sea had burst some thirty years before, 

 drowning the quarry and leaving it as a land-locked sheet of 

 sheltered deep water which rose and fell with every tide. 

 Here he moored a large canal barge, upon which he had built 

 a wooden house, divided into chemical and biological labora- 

 tories, and which, for obvious reasons, he named " The Ark." 

 Two little Norwegian skiffs were attached to " The Ark," 

 one for the chemists and the other for the biologists, and on 

 the opening day Dr. Hugh Robert Mill and I were invited to 

 name them. He called his '' The Asymptote," and I named 

 the other " Appendicularia." Murray ridiculed our preten- 

 tious names, and said that in a few days the one would 

 probably be called " the Simmie," or " the Tottie," and the 

 other "Dick." 



This floating biological station, after some years' work at 

 Granton, was towed through the Forth and Clyde Canal to 

 Millport, on the Cumbrae island, and there it was beached and 

 became an annex of the Millport biological station. During 

 the period when " The Ark " was at Granton, and later, 

 Murray and Irvine turned out a good deal of joint work on the 

 chemistry of the secretion of carbonate of lime by marine 

 organisms, on the solution of carbonate of lime by the carbon- 

 dioxide in sea-water, and on the chemical changes taking 

 place in muds and other deposits on the sea bottom. 



But his chief scientific work at this time and for years 

 afterwards was the joint investigation at the " Challenger " 

 Ofiice of the enormous series of deposits (said to be over 

 12,000) which he and the Abbe Renard had accumulated 

 from many expeditions and all seas. When one entered the 

 little laboratory on the top floor of 32 Queen Street, after 

 penetrating the dense cloud of tobacco smoke, the first thing 

 one heard, rather than saw, was John Murray issuing some 



