1 86 NATURE AND MAN. 



soil to which he has been transplanted. But the rest — our fathers 

 and elder brothers — " Where are they ? " It is for us of the 

 present generation to show that they live in our lives ; to carry 

 forward the work which they commenced ; and to transmit the 

 influence of their example to our own successors. 



There is one of these great men, whose departure from among 

 us since last we met claims a special notice, and whose life — full 

 as it was of years and honours — we should have all desired to see 

 prolonged for a few months, could its feebleness have been un- 

 attended with suffering. For we should all then have sympathized 

 with Murchison, in the delight with which he would have received 

 the intelligence of the safety of the friend in whose scientific 

 labours and personal welfare he felt to the last the keenest interest. 

 That this intelligence, which our own expedition for the relief of 

 Livingstone would have obtained (we will hope) a few months 

 later, should have been brought to us through the generosity of 

 one, and the enterprising ability — may I not use our peculiarly 

 English word, the " pluck " — of another of our American brethren, 

 cannot but be a matter of national regret to us. But let us bury 

 that regret in the common joy which both nations feel in the 

 result ; and while we give a cordial welcome to Mr. Stanley, let 

 us glory in the prospect now opening, that England and America 

 will co-operate in that noble object which — far more than the 

 discovery of the sources of the Nile — our great traveller has set 

 before himself as his true mission, the extinction of the slave 

 trade. 



At the last meeting of this association, I had the pleasure of 

 being able to announce, that I had received from the First Lord 

 of the Admiralty a favourable reply to a representation I had 

 ventured to make to him, as to the importance of prosecuting on 

 a more extended scale the course of inquiry into the physical and 

 biological conditions of the deep sea, on which, with my colleagues 

 Professor Wyviile Thomson and Mr. J. Gwyn Jeffreys, I had been 

 engaged for the three preceding years. That for which I had 

 asked was a circumnavigating expedition of at least three years' 

 duration, provided with an adequate scientific staff, and with the 

 most complete equipment that our experience could devise. The 

 Council of the Royal Society having been led by the encouraging 



