CHAPTER VII 



SIR JOHN MURRAY : A GREAT 

 OCEANOGRAPHER 



MAN, like most of the mammals, is essentially 

 a land-living organism. His ancestry, " probably 

 arboreal/' was redolent of the soil. His pre- 

 historic forerunners were as unaccustomed to 

 commerce on the ocean as are to-day the anthro- 

 poid apes of Africa and the far East. But as 

 far as recorded history goes back he had some 

 traffic with the deep, and in more or less in- 

 adequate boats he skirted the fringes of islands 

 and of continents. But any accurate and detailed 

 knowledge of the nature and the contents of the 

 waters upon which he floated, and of the solid 

 rocks which underlie those waters, is an affair of 

 yesterday, hardly half a century old. 



At the time that Sir John Murray took up the 

 investigation of the bottom of the ocean we knew 

 less about the conditions of deep-sea life and the 

 submerged soil which supports it than we do at 



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