1914-15.] Obituary Notice. 307 
drawn in 1889, and it was only after offering to finish the work of publish- 
ing at his own expense that Murray was able to get a further grant of 
£1600. As it was, Murray spent a large amount of his own money in 
completing the undertaking. 
The completion of the publication of the Challenger Reports did not 
mean that the great centre for oceanographical research which Murray 
had created in Edinburgh passed out of existence. Right down to the 
time of his death Murray’s laboratory, with its skilled staft’, remained open 
as a centre of active investigation where foreign or British workers were 
always made welcome, and every facility, including access to the unique 
collection of oceanic deposits, placed at their disposal. 
It must not be supposed that Murray’s work was confined to inspiring,, 
assisting, and organising the activities of other investigators, great and 
pre-eminent though this work was. He was all the while engaged in 
active and fruitful research himself, and the three volumes associated 
specially with his authorship — that on Deep-Sea Deposits, written jointly 
with Professor Renard, and those which summarise the general scientific 
results — are amongst the most valuable of the whole series. In these 
investigations Murray by no means confined himself to data obtained 
during the actual voyage of the Challenger: with the object of checking 
and amplifying these, he conducted a number of independent inquiries. 
In 1880 and 1882 he carried out with Tizard important explorations in 
the Government surveying ships Knight Errant and Triton. One of the 
most interesting results of these explorations was the solution of an oceano- 
graphical puzzle dating from the time of the cruise of the Lightning 
(1868), when the discovery was made that in the region of ocean com- 
mencing about 70 geographical miles N.N.W. of Cape Wrath and extend- 
ing about 85 miles in a north-westerly direction there existed a remarkable 
sharp line of demarcation between a warmer area (so far as the deeper 
waters were concerned) to the south-west and a colder area to the north- 
east. The solution of the puzzle turned out, as suspected by Tizard, to 
rest on the presence of a submarine ridge running in a north-west and 
south-east direction, reaching to between 300 and 200 fathoms of the 
surface, and forming an efficient barrier to the circulation of ocean water 
below this level. 
Murray organised an excellent little marine laboratory at Gran ton, and 
another at Millport. The latter was eventually handed over to a local 
committee, which later on developed into the Marine Biological Association 
of the West of Scotland. In connection with this local Scottish work the 
steam yacht Medusa was built and specially equipped, and on it Murray, 
