MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 33 
following :—‘‘ On another occasion, several companions ar- 
rived from Stirling to see my experiments; they had with 
them five dogs, one of them being ‘ Mysie,’ a large dog belonging 
to Sir John Hay, and I had a large Newfoundland called ‘ Max.’ 
_ We resolved to give the dogs a shock. They weré duly arranged 
in the room, and the circuit was completed by bringing the 
noses of the two largest dogs together. Pandemonium was the 
_ result. Hach dog believed he had been bitten by the other. 
_ They fought, chairs and tables were over-turned, and much 
of the apparatus broken. In the future, I was requested to 
turn my attention to the observational sciences of botany, 
zoology, and geology.” 
He then spent some years, in the ’sixties, at the University 
_ of Edinburgh where he was known as a “chronic”’ student, 
1 working at the subjects in which he was interested without 
_ following any definite course. Amongst the Professors under 
whom he studied at that time, and who became his close 
friends in later life, were P. G. Tait in Physics, Crum Brown 
in Chemistry, Turner in Anatomy, and Archibald Geikie in 
Geology. A decade or so later, after the return of the 
“ Challenger’ Expedition, he became once more a student at 
the University of Ediburgh, and that was when I had the 
good fortune first to meet him. 
In 1868 he visited Spitzbergen and Jan Mayen and other 
_ parts of the Arctic regions on board a Peterhead whaler, on 
_ which, on the strength of having once been a medical student, 
he was shipped as surgeon. This voyage of seven months 
probably did much to confirm that interest in the phenomena 
and problems of the Ocean which had been first aroused on 
his passage home from Canada, ten years before. This interest 
was doubtless further stimulated during the immediately 
following years by the epoch-making results of the pioneer 
_ deep-sea expeditions in the “ Lightning” and “ Porcupine,” 
which explored, under the direction of Wyville Thomson, 
99 
