president's address. 9 



matters investigated are often renaote and almost inaccessible. 

 Unknown factors may enter into every problem. The samples required 

 may be at the other end of a rope or a wire eight or ten miles long, 

 and the oceanographer may have to grope for them literally in the dark 

 and under other difficult conditions which make it uncertain whether 

 his samples when obtained are adequate and representative, and whether 

 they have undergone any change since leaving their natural environ- 

 ment. It is not surprising then that in the progress of knowledge 

 mistakes have been made and corrected, that views have been held on 

 what seemed good scientific grounds which later on were proved to 

 be en-oneous. For example, Edward Forbes, in his division of life in 

 the sea into zones, on what then seemed to be sufficiently good obser- 

 vations in the ^gean, but which we now know to be exceptional, placed 

 the limit of life at 300 fathoms, while Wyville Thomson and his fellow- 

 workers on the Porcupine and the Challenger showed that there is no 

 azoic zone even in the great abysses. 



Or, lagain, take the celebrated ^myth of ' Bathybius. ' In Jthe 

 'sixties of last century samples of Atlantic mud, taken when surveying 

 the bottom for the fust telegraph cables and preserved in alcohol, were 

 found when examined by Huxley, Haeckel and others to contain what 

 seemed to be an exceedingly primitive protoplasmic organism, which 

 was supposed on good evidence to be widely extended over the floor of the 

 ocean. The discovei'y of this Bathybius was said to solve the problem 

 of how the deep-sea animals were nourished in the absence of sea- 

 weeds. Here was a widespread protoplasmic meadow upon which other 

 organisms could graze. Belief in Bathybius seemed to be confumed 

 and established by Wyville Thomson's results in the Porcupine 

 Expedition of 1869, but was exploded by the naturalists on the Chal- 

 ieng^er some five years later. Buchanan in his recently published 

 ' Accounts Bendered ' tells us how he and his colleague Murray were 

 keenly on the look-out for hours at a time on all possible occasions 

 for traces of this organism, and how they finally proved, in the spring 

 of 1875 on the voyage between Hong-Kong and Yokohama, that the 

 all-pervading substance like coagiilated mucus was an amorphous 

 precipitate of sulphate of lime thrown down from the sea-water in the 

 mud on the addition of a certain proportion of alcohol. He wrote to 

 this effect from Japan to Professor Crum Brown, and it is in evidence 

 that after receiving this letter Crum Brown interested his friends in 

 Edinburgh by showing them how to make Bathybius in the 

 chemical laboratory. Huxley at the Sheffield Meeting of the British 

 Association in 1879 handsomely admitted that he had been mistaken, and 

 it is said that he characterised Bathybius as ' not having fulfilled the 

 promise of its youth.' Will any of our present oceanographic beliefs 



