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NATURE 



[November 3, 1921 



Edinburgh and the Rise of Oceanography.^ 



By Pkof. \\ . A. Herdman, C.B.E., F.R.S. 



EDINBURGH may be regarded as the birth- 

 place and the early home of modern ocean- 

 ography, and Edinburgh men and Edinburgh ideas 

 played a leading part during the nineteenth cen- 

 tury in establishing this comprehensive science of 

 the sea. Oceanography, if of modern develop- 

 ment, is of ancient origm. The foundations upon 

 which it has been recently built can be traced 

 back to very early times, to the records of natural- 

 ists and the observations of seamen from the 

 voyages of the Phoenicians onwards, and maps 

 have been constructed to show the growth of our 

 knowledge of the oceans from the shores of the 

 Mediterranean in the time, say, of Homer, and 

 later of Aristotle, on to the Atlantic voyages of 

 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the cir- 

 cumnavigation of Magellan in 1522, when the first 

 attempt, so far as we know, was made to sound 

 the Pacific with a 200-fathom line at a spot we 

 now know to be about 2000 fathoms deep. 

 Pytheas, who first passed the Pillars of Hercules 

 into the unknown Atlantic, and penetrated to 

 British seas and brought back reports of Ultima 

 Thule and of a sea to the north thick and sluggish, 

 like a jelly-fish, was an early oceanographer in the 

 fourth century B.C. ; and so, coming to later times, 

 was that truly scientific navigator, Capt. James 

 Cook, who sailed to the South Pacific on a transit 

 of \'enus expedition in 1769, with Sir Joseph Banks 

 as naturalist on board, and later circumnavigated 

 the Southern Ocean about lat. 60° S., and so 

 finally disproved the existence of a great southern 

 continent. 



It is impossible in one short lecture to trace all 

 stages and mention all worthy names, but a list 

 of the more notable voyages of exploration in 

 the nineteenth century recalls the names of the 

 great men such as Darwin, Hooker, and Huxley, 

 who went with the ships as naturalists, and all 

 of whom contributed in their turn to our know- 

 ledge of the sea and its contents. 



Information as to the bottom of the sea and 

 the animals living there is obtained chiefly by 

 dredging and trawling, and we find that the 

 naturalist's dredge, a modification of the fisher- 

 man's oyster dredge, came into common use about 

 1830, and was the chief implement employed by 

 the marine biologists of the nineteenth century, 

 who made known the riches of the British seas. 



In tracing the development of the science of 

 the sea, we may take as examples the work of 

 three Edinburgh men, who are types of periods 

 of investigation in the nineteenth century — 

 Edward Forbes, the pioneer of shallow-water 

 dredging during the earlier half of the century ; 

 W'yville Thomson, the explorer of the deep sea 

 and scientific leader of the Challenger expedition ; 

 and John Murray, who continued the work of 

 Wyville Thomson and g-uided research in the last 



1 Abrideed from an evening discourse to the British Association at Edin- 

 burgh on September 13. 



NO. 2714, VOL. I08I 



quarter-century into deeper and more fundamental 

 problems of the ocean, and brought the science 

 practically to its present position and outlook. 



Edward Forbes, though of Scottish descent,^ 

 was born in the Isle of Nian about lOO years ago, 

 but much of his short life and his remarkable 

 work was connected with Edinburgh. His long 

 and erratic career as a student of medicine and 

 science was spent here, and he died a professor 

 in the university of the city. As a mere boy in 

 the Isle of Man he commenced his marine bio- 

 logical studies and the accumulation of those col- 

 lections and observations which afterwards formed 

 the basis of his classic works on " British Star- 

 fishes " and "British Mollusca." He left home at 

 the age of seventeen, and from that time onwards 

 the whole of his short, strenuous life was devoted 

 to science and mainly to the science of the sea. 

 He was a many-sided genius, who produced ark 

 extraordinary volume of first-rate original work 

 in marine biology and inspired advances in ocean- 

 ography which he did not live to see carried out. 



After a short period of art study in London 

 Forbes arrived in Edinburgh in 1831 as a medical 

 student, and here he remained a student for nine 

 years. It is interesting to note that our three 

 selected leaders in science were all students of 

 medicine in this university, and not one of them 

 graduated. Forbes was the centre of a brilliant 

 group of young medicals, about half a dozen of 

 whom were afterwards fellow professors with him 

 in the same university. The chief of these was 

 perhaps John Goodsir, the famous anatomist, and 

 in 1839 we find Forbes and Goodsir dredging ia 

 the Shetland seas, with results which Forbes- 

 made known to the meeting of the British Asso- 

 ciation at Birmingham that summer with such 

 good effect that the celebrated "Dredging Com- 

 mittee " of the association was formed to continue 

 the good work. Forbes and his British Associa- 

 tion Dredging Committee may be said truly to 

 have led on, step by step, to the Challenger and 

 other expeditions of modern oceanography. 



One very curious animal which Forbes and 

 Goodsir made known from Hebridean seas is the 

 bright-green compound Ascidian called Syntethys 

 hehridica, which has since been shown to be the 

 same as a Mediterranean animal of a lovely violet 

 colour named by the French naturalist, Savigny, 

 Diazona violacea. The animal in our seas isgreei-fc 

 when alive, but when it dies undergoes a chemical 

 change and becomes violet. As an example of the 

 constancy of Nature, I may add that nearly 

 seventy years after this rare animal had been 

 found by Forbes and Goodsir I went to the 

 Hebridean seas to search for it, and in exactly 

 the same spot, to the north of the Croulin Islands^ 

 came upon it in quantity sufficient to supply vari 

 ous museums and give material to my chemical 

 friends who were investigating the pigment. 



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