ii 
MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. UT 
it is also true that in all his expeditions—in the British seas 
from the Channel Islands to the Shetlands, in Norway, in 
the Mediterranean as far as the Aegean Sea—his broad outlook 
on the problems of nature was that of the modern oceano- 
erapher, and he was the spiritual ancestor of men like Sir 
Wyville Thomson, of the Challenger Expedition, and 
Sir John Murray, whose recent accidental death, in the midst 
of active work, was an irreparable loss to this new and rapidly 
advancing science of the sea. 
Forbes in his marine investigations, as we have seen, 
worked at border-lme problems, dealing for example with 
the relations of Geology to Zoology, and the effect of the 
past history of the land and sea upon the distribution of 
plants and animals at the present day, and in these respects 
he was an early oceanographer. For the essence of that new 
subject is that it also investigates border-line problems 
and is based upon, and makes use of all the older fundamental 
sciences—Physics, Chemistry, and Biology—and shows for 
example how variations in the great ocean currents may 
account for the movements and abundance of the migratory 
fishes, and how periodic changes in the chemical characters 
of the sea are co-related with the distribution at the different 
seasons of the all-important microscopic organisms that 
render our oceanic waters as prolific a source of food as the 
pastures of the land. 
Oceanography is as yet scarcely known in the Universities, 
and when it does come to be recognised and provided for, it 
will probably be as a research department, carrying on investi- 
gations partly by experiments in the University laboratories 
on shore, partly by observations on special expeditions at 
sea, and partly no doubt by the accumulation and comparison 
of data as to temperatures and salinities, obtained from com- 
mercial vessels making ocean traverses—all on the lines 
shown by the magnificent “‘ Musée Océanographique” at 
