NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM—1965 701 
and H N Moseley became Professor at Oxford. Moseley, the son of a mathematician, 
became an eminent zoologist and one of the founders of the Marine Biological 
Association of the United Kingdom. It was his son, H. G. J. Moseley who was con- 
Sidered one of the most promising young men of his generation -- in his twenties 
he determined that the properties of the atom were determined by its nuclear 
charge. The loss of this young man at the age of 27 in the Gallipoli campaign 
may have delayed the atomic age by a generation -- certainly this loss had much 
to do with deferment policies for men of science in the second world war. 
The Challenger's track included two crossings of the North Atlantic, a 
meandering line down the south Atlantic and across to the Cape of Good Hope, 
Thence to Kerguelen Island and to the edge of the Antarctic continent, north to 
Australia, through the East Indies, north to Japan and across the north Pacific 
to the Hawaiian Islands and southward to Chile, around the horn and back through 
the Atlantic to England. In all, the Challenger logged 68,890 nautical miles on 
her cruise. For some reason the Challenger did not touch any United States port. 
In this long cruise she made 362 official stations, lost about 28 thermometers 
and broke her dredging line eleven times. This is a remarkable record, not often 
equalled by modern research vessels. 
What were the questions that the men of the Challenger - and those who 
stayed at home - hoped to find answers for in their long exploration of the deeps? 
First, no one knew how deep the ocean was, or wiat was on its bottom. It was 
thought that perhaps the great chalk formation of the Cretaceous period was being 
actively formed nowadays at the bottom by the activity of organisms -- this idea 
was known as "the continuity of the chalk! Then it was hoped by some that the 
expedition would finc in the great deeps the survivors of the past -- the 
ere 
trilobites and primitive echinoderms of the paleozoic tines, and there was 
Bathybius, the primordial life substance, a sort of giant amoeba like creature 
that had been found in the sediment samples made by some of early telegraph cable 
survey ships. Professor Huxley had named this creature Bathybius haeckeli for his 
eminent German colleague and there was lively anticipation by some naturalists 
that this organism might be found in abundance at the bottom. Among the other 
questions was that concerning the nature of sea water itself -- whether it was 
uniform the world over, or differed from place to place. But most of all the 
question was --- what was on the bottom of the sea? 
To answer these questions the Challenger dredged the bottom by dragging a 
net modified from commercial fishing gear, dropped long sounding lines to the 
bottom, captured water from the depths and took its temperature. 
The Challenger found that there was life at the bottom almost everywhere, 
although she did not achieve the sreatest depths -- these were not dragged until 
1950 or so by the Galathea - that bottom temperatures were uniformly old, and 
that sea water was pretty much the same everywhere. No living fossils were dis- 
covered - no trilobites or other now extinct forms. Bathybius was never found 
-- the chemist discovered that Bathybius was a colloidal precipitate of impure 
Sulphate of lime in sea water and bottom mud from the interaction of preserving 
alcohol and sediment. Thus Bathybius turned out to be an error - as Huxley re- 
marked, it had not fulfilled the promise of its youth. Nevertheless, as the chen- 
ist Buchanan said in his report on the true nature of this mysterious primordial 
plasm, it "should not be allowed to pass into oblivion". Like Forbes! notion of 
the lifeless nature of the deep sea, it was an error that stimulated thought and 
research. It does not necessarily follow, of course, that bad ideas are better 
than good ones, but sometimes a bad idea is better than none at all. Unfortu- 
