NA TURE 



85 



THURSDAY, JUNE i, 1876 



' SCIENTIFIC WORTHIES 

 VI 1 1. —Charles Wyville Thomson 



CHARLES WYVILLE THOMSON was born at 

 Bonsyde, a small pioperty in Linlithgowshire, 

 which had been long in his family, on the 5th of March, 

 1830. All his early associations were with Edinburgh ; 

 his father was a surgeon in the East India Company's 

 service, and spent most of his life abroad ; but his grand- 

 father was a distinguished Edinburgh clergyman, and his 

 great-grandfather was " Principall Clerke of Chancellary " 

 at the time of the rebellion of 1745. 



Wyville Thomson got most of his schooling at Mer- 

 chiston Castle Academy, at that time under the excellent 

 management of Mr. Charles Chalmers, brother of the 

 famous divine. He left school and began the medical 

 course in Edinburgh University in the year 1845. 

 After studying for three years he fell into somewhat 

 delicate health from overwork, and while still scarcely 

 more than a lad, in iSjo, to gain a year's rest, he 

 accepted the lecturership on botany in King's College, 

 Aberdeen. In the following year he was appointed 

 lecturer on the same subject at Marischal College 

 and University, which University conferred on him the 

 degree of LL.D. He at this time was an indefatigable 

 worker among the lower forms of animal Hfe, and pub- 

 lished several papers on the Polyzoa and Sertularian 

 zoophytes of Scotland. Even at this time some of his 

 philosophical speculations as to the development of 

 certain Medusoid forms attracted notice, though they 

 appear to have been considered too daring by Johnston, 

 of Berwick-on-Tweed, and Edward Forbes. What would 

 these worthies say, if they were living now, about the study 

 of Ontogenesis as it at present exists amongst us ? 



Towards the close of 1853 a vacancy arose in the Pro- 

 fessorship of Natural History (Botany and Zoology) in the 

 Queen's College, Cork, owing to the resignation of the Rev. 

 W. Hincks, F.L.S., and on August 26 Wyville Thomson 

 received the appointment. He had, however, hardly 

 settled down to the duties of this professorship, when a 

 vacancy occurred in the Professorship of Mineralogy and 

 Geology in the Queen's College, Belfast, by the resignation 

 of Fred. M'Coy, who had been elected to one of the 

 professorships in the New University of Melbourne. 

 W'yville Thomson applied ,to be transferred to the 

 Belfast chair, and was appointed thereto in September 

 1854. 



The next five years were years of busy work for 

 him. In addition to courses of lectures on Geology and 

 Mineralogy, he laid the foundation and built up a good 

 deal of the superstructure of the present excellent Museum 

 of the Queen's College, Belfast. In addition to many 

 papers on zoological subjects, published by him at this 

 date, we may mention one on a genus of Trilobites, read 

 before the London Geological Society, and on a new 

 fossil Cirriped, published in the "Annals of Natural 

 History." 



The study of fossil forms without a good knowledge of 

 existing forms is in itself most useless, and a palaeonto- 

 logist of this sort is after all little more than a cataloguer ; 

 Vol. XIV.— No. 344 



such was not Wyville Thomson. At this time, one fascinat- 

 ing group of the Echinoderms (the Lily Stars) attracted his 

 attention, and while investigating the immense assem- 

 blage of extinct forms belonging thereto, he determined 

 to know all that could be known about the life history 

 of the few living forms. True, the illustrious Vaughan 

 Thompson had some thirty years previously discovered 

 and described a British Pentacrinus, and had determined 

 that it was but the young stage of our common though beau- 

 tiful rosy feather-star ; but a great deal remained to be done 

 ere the history of even this form was complete, and it was 

 not until the close of 1862 that Wyville Thomson's re- 

 searches were sufficiently advanced to enable him to lay 

 them before the Royal Society. They have since been 

 published in the volume of the Philosophical Transac- 

 tions for 1865, and it is not too much to say that this 

 memoir will ever be a witness of the author's acute and 

 accurate powers of research. The illustrations are all 

 from exquisitely finished sketches by the author, and 

 show a most enviable power of drawing, an art almost 

 indispensable to the naturalist. These investigations into 

 the pentacrinoid stages of Comatula were but part of a 

 sei ies of observations on the genus Pentacrinus itself, and 

 Wyville Thomson amassed a lot of material with the 

 object of writing a memoir on the group. 



About 1864 the son of the illustrious Michael Sars, 

 Professor of Zoology in the University of Christiania, was 

 one of the Acting Commissioners of Fisheries for Norway, 

 and as such was engaged in a series of scientific investi- 

 gations as to the fisheries on the Lofoten Islands, situ- 

 ated on the north-west coast of Norway. One day, 

 dredging in water about 700 feet deep, for the purpose of 

 determining the condition of the sea-bed, he obtained a 

 number of specimens of a strange Crinoid, which at once 

 struck him as being not unlike the pentacrinoid stage of 

 Comatula Sarsii, with which he was familiar. 



Here it is but right to mention that almost up to this 

 date, men of science seemed to have made up their minds 

 that life did not and could not exist below a certain depth 

 of the sea. There were, according to Edward Forbes, fixed 

 zones of depth, ist, the Uttoral zone, between low and high 

 water-marks ; 2nd, the Laminarian zone, from low water 

 to a depth of fifteen fathoms ; 3rd, the Coralline zone, 

 from the fifteen-fathom line to a depth of fifty fathoms ; 

 and 4th, the zone of deep-sea corals extending from the 

 edge of the Coralline zone to an unknown lower limit. 

 " In this region, as we descend deeper and deeper, its 

 inhabitants become more and more modified andfcA-er 

 and fewer, indicating our approach towards an abyss 

 where life is either extinguished or exhibits but a few 

 sparks to mark its lingering presence." Though the very 

 general idea entertained by naturalists was that the 

 depths of the sea were destitute of life, yet from time to 

 time remarkable specimens were without doubt brought 

 up from very great depths, and these occurrences, some 

 of which were known to Forbes, had the evident effect of 

 making him, during the later period of his life, write 

 cautiously on the subject. The reader who would care to 

 know all that is known as to the records of the existence 

 of life up to 1865, will find a full account thereof in 

 Wyville Thomson's " Depths of the Sea." 



G. O. Sars lost no time in announcing to his father his 

 interesting discovery, and, acting on Prof. Sars's advice, he 



