46 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
We now come to a period of great local scientific activity, 
when Murray exercised a notable influence in the University 
scientific circle and took a leading part in every new movement. 
He was a prominent member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 
and of the Scottish Meteorological and Geographical Societies, 
he helped to establish the Observatory on the summit of 
Ben Nevis, and in 1884, along with his friend Robert Irvine 
of Caroline Park, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, he acquired 
the lease of an old sandstone quarry at Granton ito which 
the sea had burst some thirty years before, drowning the quarry 
and leaving it as a land-locked sheet of sheltered deep water 
which rose and fell with every tide. Here he moored a large 
canal barge, upon which he had built a house, divided into 
chemical and biological laboratories, and which, for obvious 
reasons, he named “ The Ark.” Two little Norwegian skiffs 
were attached to ‘“‘ The Ark,’ one for the chemists and the 
other for the biologists, and on the opening day Dr. Hugh 
Robert Mill and I were invited to name them. He called his 
‘The Asymptote ” and I named the other “ Appendicularia.” 
Murray ridiculed our pretentious names, and said that in a 
few days the one would probably be called “the Simmie,” 
or “ the Tottie,’’ and the other ‘‘ Dick.”’ 
This floating biological station, after some years’ work 
at Granton, was towed through the Forth and Clyde Canal 
to Millport on the Cumbraes, and there it was beached and 
remains to this day as part of the Millport Biological Station. 
During the period when ‘“‘ The Ark” was at Granton, and 
later, Murray and Irvine turned out a good deal of joint 
work on the Chemistry of the secretion of carbonate of lime 
by marine organisms, on the solution of carbonate of lime 
by the carbon-dioxide in sea-water, and on the chemical 
_ changes taking place in muds and other deposits on the sea- 
bottom. But, after all, his chief scientific work at this time 
and for years afterwards was the joint investigation at the 
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