of the Fishery Board for Scotland. 



409 



SECTION C. 



REPORT ON OBSERVATIONS RELATING TO THE PHYSICS 

 AND CHEMISTRY OF THE NORTH SEA DURING 1888 

 AND 1889, AND INCLUDING A REVIEW OF THE ANALY- 

 TICAL WORK HITHERTO UNDERTAKEN FOR THE 

 FISHERY BOARD FOR SCOTLAND. By John Gibson, Ph.D. 



Introductory. 



Having undertaken in July 1888, at the request of the Fishery Board 

 for Scotland, the general supervision of the physical work which they 

 desired to have carried on in connection with the scientific inquiries then 

 in progress relating to the Fisheries, it became my duty to draw up a 

 scheme of work for the remainder of the current year. I accordingly 

 laid before the Committee of Scientific Investigations a scheme of work, a 

 principal feature of which was the proposal to send an expedition during 

 the month of September to investigate some of the more important 

 physical and chemical characters of the waters of the North Sea generally. 

 In making this proposal I was guided by the following considerations : — 



The physical investigations undertaken hitherto in connection with the 

 Fishery Board had their beginning in the short expedition to the Moray 

 Firth in the summer of 1883. The results of the physical observations 

 made during this expedition were given in a paper published in the 

 Annual Report of the Board for 1885, in which also the lines were laid 

 down of a method for the accurate examination of sea water, intended 

 to lead to the detection of any local differences in the waters along the coasts, 

 and more especially in the Firths and Estuaries. These preliminary in- 

 vestigations were followed up in the summer of 1886 by a more extended 

 series of observations in the same locality, namely, the Moray and ad- 

 joining Firths, the results of which were embodied in a paper by Dr H. 

 R. Mill and myself conjointly, and published in the Report of the Board 

 for 1887. Dr Mill also contributed a paper to the Report for 1886, 

 giving an account of an elaborate series of physical observations carried on 

 by him in the region of the Firths of Forth and Tay in connection with 

 tho Scottish Marine Station. As these investigations were practically con- 

 fined to the waters of the Firths and Estuaries of the East Coast of Scot- 

 land, that is to say, of the north-western boundary of the North Sea, it ap- 

 peared very desirable to extend these investigations over a wider area. 



Such extension was indeed necessary in order to arrive at a better 

 understanding of the true bearings of the data which had accumulated, and 

 more especially to account for the very remarkable, puzzling, and apparently 

 contradictory results arrived at by the examination in the Chemical 

 Laboratory of the University of Edinburgh, of the large number of 

 samples of water collected in the Moray and adjoining Firths in 1883 and 

 1886 respectively. 



It is a somewhat surprising fact that so little should have been done 

 by this country towards the investigation of the region of the North Sea, 

 from which so large a proportion of our fish supply is obtained. As 

 a matter of fact, the greater part of our scientific knowledge of this region 

 is derived from foreign sources, and especially from the labours of the 

 German Ministerial Commission zur wissenshaftlichen Untersuchung der 

 deutschen Meere,in Kiel, which was appointed in 1870. Under the direc- 

 tion of this Commission the ' Pommerania ' expedition was sent in the 

 summer of 1872 to investigate the physical, chemical, and biological 



