32 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Thomson more than any man who proved that Forbes' views 

 were in this particular erroneous, and that many and varied 

 living things inhabit the greatest depths of the ocean. It 

 may seem to some of us that Forbes lived very long ago, in a 

 remote period of last century, but Wyville Thomson bridges 

 over the gap to our time. He knew Edward Forbes, and I 

 was fortunate enough to be the student, and later on assistant, 

 of Sir Wyville Thomson. It is then, you will realise, a peculiar 

 satisfaction to me to make known to a younger generation 

 of marine biologists what I am able to recollect or recover 

 as to the life-work of my revered master, and as to the part 

 he played in that great development of Oceanography as a 

 Science which characterised the latter part of the Nineteenth 

 Century. 



Charles Wyville Thomson was born on March 5th, 1830, 

 at his ancestral country house of Bonsyde, within sight of 

 the famous loch and ruined royal palace of Linlithgow, and 

 not far from the shores of the Firth of Forth. His family 

 had been connected with Edinburgh and the neighbourhood 

 for generations, his great grandfather, for example, being a 

 law officer of the Crown at the time of the Jacobite rising 

 in 1745. He was educated at Merchiston Castle School, formerly 

 the home of Napier the inventor of logarithms, and, as in 

 the case of some other men of Science, his favourite study 

 at school was, we are told, the Latin poets. We are apt to 

 forget that in these cases there was probably no science taught 

 in the school, and no opportunity given to the boy of studying 

 anything more interesting than the Odes of Horace. 



At the age of 16 he matriculated as a student of Medicine 

 in the University of Edinburgh, but his main interests were 

 said to be Zoology, Botany, and Geology, and he was suspected 

 of sometimes wandering as an observer and collector of marine 

 invertebrates along the prolific shores of the Firth, when he 

 ought according to rules and regulations to have been engaged 



