_ MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 37 
formal instructors alone that one learns. Murray was never on | 
the teaching staff of the University ; but a few of us (generally 
Sir David Bruce, now of the War Office, Professor Noel-Paton, 
now of Glasgow, and myself), who were then, in the late 
’seventies, young students of Science, and were privileged 
to have the run of the “ Challenger” Office, learned more of 
practical Natural History from John Murray than we did 
from many University lectures. 
This was in the few years following on the return of the 
“ Challenger ”’ Expedition in 1876, and the vast collections of 
all kinds brought back from all the seas and remote islands 
were being classified and sorted out into groups for further 
examination in a house near the University, known as the 
“ Challenger Office.” Murray, as First Assistant on the Staff, 
had charge of the office and the collections, and welcomed a 
few eager young workers who were willing to devote free 
afternoons to helping in the multifarious work always in 
progress. 
There we first made acquaintance with the celebrated 
‘ 
new deep-sea “oozes,” learnt to distinguish them under the 
microscope and how to demonstrate the silicious Radiolaria 
hidden in the calcareous Globigerina ooze; and there we first 
saw such wonders of the deep as Holopus and Cephalodiscus 
and the extraordinary new abyssal Holothurians, afterwards 
known as Elasipoda. These—now the common-places of 
marine biology—were then revelations, and those of us who 
witnessed the discoveries in-the-making will always associate 
them with “‘ Challenger Murray ” as the arch-magician of the 
laboratory—a sort of modern scientific astrologer, bringing 
mysterious unknown things out of store-bottles, and then 
showing us how to demonstrate their true nature. [am afraid 
that we who are trying to inspire students with the sacred 
fire at the present day have no such wonders to show as those 
first-fruits in the early days of deep-sea research. Then between 
