August 26, 1920] 



NATURE 



813 



Oceanography and the Sea-Fisheries.* 



Bv WILLIAM A. HERDMAN, CB.E., D.Sc, Sc.D., LL.D., F.R.S. 

 Professor of Oceanography in the University of Liverpool, President. 



IT has been customary, when occasion required, for 

 -^ the president to offer a brief tribute to the memory 

 f distinguished members of the Association lost to 

 cience during the preceding year. These, for the 

 most part, have been men of advanced years and high 

 reputation who had completed their life-work and 

 served well in their day the Association and the 

 sciences which it represents. Such are our late 

 general treasurer, Prof. Perry, and our past-president, 

 Sir Norman Lockyer, of whom the retiring president 

 has just spoken. We have this year no other such 

 losses to record ; but it seems fitting on the present 

 occasion to pause for a moment and devote a 

 grateful thought to that glorious band of fine young 

 men of high promise in science who, in the years 

 since our Australian meeting in 1914, gave, it may 

 be, in brief days and months of sacrifice, greater 

 service to humanity and the advance of civilisation 

 than would have been possible in years of normal time 

 and work. A few names stand out already known 

 and highly honoured — Moseley, Jenkinson, Geoffrey 

 Smith, Keith Lucas, Gregory, and more recently 

 Leonard Doncaster — all grievous losses ; but there are 

 •also others, younger members of our Association, who 

 had not yet had opportunity for showing accomplished 

 work, but who equally gave up all for a great ideal. 

 I prefer to offer a collective rather than an individual 

 tribute. Other young men of science will arise and 

 carry on their work, but the gap in our ranks 

 remains. Let their successors remember that it serves 

 as a reminder of a great example and of high en- 

 deavour worthy of our gratitude and of permanent 

 record in the annals of science. 



At the last Cardiff meeting of the British Associa- 

 tion in i8gi you had as your president the eminent 

 astronomer Sir William Huggins, who discoursed 

 upon the then recent discoveries of the spectroscope in 

 relation to the chemical nature, density, temperature, 

 pressure, and even the motions of the stars. From 

 the sky to the sea is a long drop, but the sciences of 

 both have this in common : that they deal with funda- 

 mental principles and with vast numbers. More than 

 three hundred years ago Spenser in the " Faerie 

 Queene " compared "the seas abundant progeny" 

 with "the starres on hy," and recent investigations 

 show thaf a litre of sea-water may contain more than 

 a hundred times as many living organisms as there are 

 stars visible to the eye on a clear night. 



During the past quarter of a century great advances 

 have been made in the science of the sea, and the 

 aspects and prospects of sea-fisheries research have 

 undergone changes which encourag^e the hope that a 

 combination of the work now carried on by hydro- 

 graphers and biologists in most civilised countries on 

 fundamental problems of the ocean may result in a 

 more rational exploitation and administration of the 

 fishing industries 



And yet even at your former Cardiff meeting thirty 

 years ago there were at least three papers of oceano- 

 graphic interest — one by Prof. Osborne Reynolds on 

 the action of waves and currents, another by Dr. 

 H. R. Mill on seasonal variation in the temperature 

 of lochs and estuaries, and the third by our honorary 

 local secretary for the present meeting. Dr. Evans 

 Hovle. on a deep-sea tow-net capable of being- opened 

 and closed under water by the electric current. 

 It was a notable meeting in several other respects, 



* Presidental address delivered at the Cardiff meeting of the British 

 Association on August 24. 



NO. 2652, VOL. 105] 



of which I shall merely mention two. In Section A 

 Sir Oliver Lodge gave the historic address in which 

 he expounded the urgent need, in the interests of both 

 science and the industries, of a national institution 

 for the promotion of physical research on a large scale. 

 Lodge's pregnant idea put forward at this Cardiff 

 meeting, supported and still further elaborated by Sir 

 Douglas Gallon as president of the Association at 

 Ipswich, has since borne notable fruit in the estab- 

 lishrnent and rapid development of the National 

 Physical Laboratory. The other outstanding- event of 

 that meeting is that you then appointed a committee 

 of eminent geologists and naturalists to consider a 

 project for boring through a coral reef, and that led 

 during following years to the sucoissive expeditions to 

 the atoll of Funafuti, in the Central Pacific, the results 

 of which, reported upon eventually by the Royal 

 Society, were of great Interest alike to geologists, 

 I biologists, and oceanographers. 



i Dr. Huggins, on taking the, chair in 1891, remarked 



[ that it was more than thirty years since the Associa- 



I tion had honoured astronomy in the selection of its 



I president. It might be said that the case of oceano- 



: graphy is harder, as the Association has never had 



I an oceanog-rapher as president; and the Association 



I might well reply, " Because until very recent years 



i there has been no oceanographer to have." If astro- 



i nomy is the oldest of the sciences, oceanography is 



probably the youngest. Depending as it does upon 



the methods and results of other sciences, it was not 



until our knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology 



was relatively far advanced that it became possible 



to apply that knowledge to the investigation and' 



explanation of the phenomena of the ocean. No one 



man has done more to apply such knowledge derived 



from various other subjects and to organise the results 



as a definite branch of science than the late Sir John 



Murray, who may therefore be regarded as the founder 



of modern oceanography. 



It is to me a matter of regret that Sir John Murray 

 was never president of the British Association. I arn 

 revealing no secret when I tell you that he might 

 have been. On more than one occasion he was invited 

 by the council to accept nomination, and he declined 

 for reasons that were good and commanded our 

 respect. He felt that the necessary duties of this post 

 would interfere with what he regarded as his primary 

 life-work — oceanographical explorations already 

 planned, and the last of which he actually carried 

 out in the North Atlantic in iqi2, when above seventy 

 years of age, in the Norwegian steamer Michael Sars 

 along with his friend Dr. Johan Hjort. 



Anyone considering the subject-matter of this new 

 science must be struck by its wide range, overlapping 

 as it does the borderlands of several other sciences 

 and making use of their methods and facts in the 

 solution of its problems. It is not only world-wide 

 jn its scope, but it also extends beyond our globe, and 

 includes astronomical data in their relation to tidal 

 and certain other oceanographical phenomena. No 

 man ip his work, or even thought* can attempt to 

 cover the whole ground, althougfh Sir John Murray, 

 in his remarkably comprehensive " Sumrnary " volumes 

 of the Challenger Expedition and other writings, went 

 far towards doing so. He, in his combination of 

 physicist, chemist, g^eologist, and biologist, was 

 th« nearest approach we have had to an all-round 

 oceanographer. The International Research Council 

 probably acted wisely at the recent Brussels Confer- 



