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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1340 



capable of being opened and closed under 

 water by the electric current. 



It was a notable meeting in several respects, 

 of wliich 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 Cardiil meeting, supported and still fur- 

 ther elaborated by Sir Douglas Galton as 

 President of the Association at Ipswich, has 

 since borne notable fruit in the establish m ent 

 and rapid development of the National Phys- 

 ical Laboratory. The other outstandng event 

 of that meeting is that you then appointed a 

 committee of eminent geologists and natural- 

 ists to consider a project for boring through a 

 coral reef, and that led during following years 

 to the successive expeditions to the atoll of 

 Pimafuti in the Central Pacific, the results of 

 which, reported upon eventually by the Eoyal 

 Society, were of great interest alike to geol- 

 ogists, biologists, and oceanographers. 



Dr. Huggins, on taking the chair in 1891, 

 remarked that it was over thirty years since 

 the association had honored astronomy in 

 the selection of its president. It might be 

 said that the case of oceanography is harder, 

 as the association has never had an ocean- 

 ographer as president — and the association 

 might well reply " Because until very recent 

 years there has been no oeeanographer to 

 have." If astronomy is the oldest of the 

 sciences, oceanography is probably the young- 

 est. Depending as it does upon the methods 

 and results of other sciences, it was not until 

 our knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biol- 

 ogy were relatively far advanced that it be- 

 came possible to apply that knowledge to the 

 investigation and explanation of the phe- 

 nomena of the ocean. No one man has done 

 more to apply such knowledge derived from 

 various other subjects and to organize the 

 results as a definite branch of science than the 

 late Sir John Murray, who may therefore be 

 regarded as the founder of modern oceanog- 

 raphy. 



It is, to me, a matter of regret that Sir 

 John Murray was never president of the Brit- 

 ish Association. I am 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 — oeeano- 

 graphical explorations already planned, and 

 the last of which he actually carried out in 

 the North Atlantic in 1912, when over seventy 

 years of age, in the Norwegian steamer 

 Michael Sars along with his friend Dr. Johan 

 Hjort. 



Any one 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 in its 

 scope but extends beyond our globe and in- 

 cludes astronomical data in their relation to 

 tidal and certain other oceanographical phe- 

 nomena. No man in his work, or even thought, 

 can attempt to cover the whole ground — 

 although Sir John Murray, in his remarkably 

 comprehensive " Summary " volumes of the 

 Challenger Expedition and other writings, 

 went far towards doing so. He, in his combi- 

 nation of physicist, chemist, geologist and 

 biologist, was the nearest approach we have 

 had to an all-round oeeanographer. The In- 

 ternational Research Council probably acted 

 wisely at the recent Brussels conference in 

 recommending the institution of two inter- 

 national sections in our subject, the one of 

 physical and the other of biological oceanog- 

 raphy — although the two overlap and are so 

 interdependent that no investigator on the one 

 side can afford to neglect the other. 



On the present occasion I must restrict 

 myself almost wholly to the latter division of 

 the subject, and be content, after brief refer- 

 ence to the founders and pioneers of our sci- 

 ence, to outline a few of those investigations 

 and problems which have appeared to me to 



