FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY AND THEIR WORK AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SCIENCE OF THE SEA BY SIR WILLIAM A. HERDMAN C.B.E., F.R.S., D.Sc., LL.D., etc. EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF NATURAL HISTORY AND SOMETIME FIRST PROFESSOR OF OCEANOGRAPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD & CO. 1923 [All rights reserved] Made and Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London PREFACE This is not a textbook of Oceanography. The comprehensive textbook, drawing contributions from various branches of science—ranging from astronomy to biology—has still to be written, and possibly the time to write such an encyclopædic work on the sea has not yet come. But it is not too soon to let the young university student, and the intelligent public in general, know that the oceans present wonderful phenomena and profoundly interesting problems to the observer and the investigator, and that a science of the sea having its roots in the remote past has of recent years developed greatly and is now growing fast into an organized body of interrelated knowledge. I have myself lived through the period that has seen the development of the Natural History of the Sea into the Science of Oceanography, and have known intimately most of the men who did the pioneer work. There can be but few others now living who have worked, as I did, along with Wyville Thomson and John Murray in Edinburgh more than forty years ago, and that is my justification for the introduction in the earlier chapters of some personal impressions of these and other nineteenth-century oceanographers. And even in regard to that earlier pioneer Edward Forbes, although I could not have known him personally as he died several years before I was born, still in my boyhood and early youth in Edinburgh some of his old friends, realizing my keen interest in the subject, talked to me of their lost hero, his ways and his work. So that I almost came to believe that I also had known him and v vi heard him discourse in glowing words of starfish and nudibranchs at the Isle of Man, of the graceful medusœ of the Clyde sea-lochs and of dredging with Goodsir and MacAndrew in the Hebrides—and so felt that I too had dwelt in Arcady. The book is really based upon a course of about twenty public lectures given in the winter of 1919–20 while I held, for the first year, the newly established Chair of Oceanography in the University of Liverpool. The purpose of the lectures was to put before my colleagues and students what I regarded as the scope and nature of this new university subject, and to interest the public of Liverpool in the deeper knowledge of the seven seas that mean so much to that great port, by giving examples of the phenomena and some explanation of the methods of investigation of the problems of the ocean. The book follows the same lines. The first half-dozen chapters are in the main biographical, dealing with the lives and work of some of the leading men who have made our science; and those were selected in regard to whom I had something to say at first hand. The remaining chapters treat of subjects rather than men, and here again I have had to be eclectic and have deliberately limited myself, in the almost science-wide as well as world-wide range of Oceanography, to those matters in which I was myself most interested, and about which, as one had found in lectures and conversation, the intelligent non-specialist inquirer for information in regard to the sea wanted to know more. The treatment of the matter, then, is not intended to be exhaustive even in the subjects chosen. The aim is rather to show that the field of inquiry is wide and varied, that the phenomena observed—many of them familiar to ocean voyagers—are all matters requiring scientific investigation and are frequently interdependent, so that the explanation of one requires a knowledge of another, as in the case of the migratory fish and the distribution of vii plankton, or the American Tile-fish and the movements of the Gulf Stream; and further that Oceanography has practical applications, such as those bearing on the sea-fisheries and the possible cultivation of our barren shores, all requiring further exploration, in the hope that man in the future may become less of a hunter and more of a farmer of the sea. I desire to record my grateful thanks to various colleagues, assistants and students, with whom I have worked at Liverpool and Port Erin, for information and co-operation and for the use of some of their photographs of natural objects taken in the laboratory or at sea. I would mention especially Professor R. Newstead, Mr. Andrew Scott, Mr. Edwin Thompson, Dr. Francis Ward, Mr. E. Neaverson and Mr. A. Fleming. I am indebted also to Professor Kofoid of California, Dr. Jules Richard of Monaco, Mr. James Chumley of the “Challenger” office, the Editor of the Popular Science Monthly and the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office for their courtesy in lending me photographs or in permitting me to reprint articles or illustrations. Finally, I would add that this book is associated in my mind with the memory of my wife—the constant companion by land and sea, in work and play, of close on thirty years—who helped me to establish the University Department of Oceanography, who encouraged me to give the course of lectures and frequently urged me to prepare them for publication, and whose helpful criticism of the material in its present form would have been invaluable. W. A. HERDMAN. LIVERPOOL, July, 1923. CONTENTS ix LIST OF PLATES xi xii FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY AND THEIR WORK CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY—THE EARLIEST FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY Oceanography, the Science of the Sea, is a subject of modern development though of ancient origin. It is only of recent years that, for very good reasons, it has come to be recognized as a distinct branch of science, an organized body of knowledge. Including, as it does, the study of the sea and its contents in all aspects—physical, chemical, and biological—it was not until other sciences were sufficiently advanced to admit of their methods and results being applied to the phenomena of the sea that oceanography became a strictly scientific study. Moreover, the development of modern oceanography has been largely dependent upon the use of steam, both for the purpose of taking up and maintaining exact observing stations at sea, and also for working the complicated apparatus that is necessary in scientific investigation. To show the comprehensive nature of this science of the sea, we need only recall its division into Hydrography, Metabolism, Bionomics, and Tidology, in which sections physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics are respectively involved. But the foundations of oceanography can be traced back to the earliest times, to the observations of naturalists and the records of seamen from the voyages of the Phœnicians onwards. Vasco da Gama, who first reached India by the 1 2 Cape of Good Hope, and Magellan, who first tried to sound the Pacific, were early oceanographers; so were Captain James Cook and Sir J. Clark Ross, who first dredged the Antarctic; but long before their days the early Phœnician, Carthaginian, and Greek explorers, starting with their home sea, the Mediterranean, brought back the first records of the nearer parts of the Indian Ocean and of the Atlantic outside the Pillars of Hercules. The records of the early voyages of the Phœnicians and the Carthaginians, all apparently undertaken with commercial ends in view, have unfortunately not been preserved;1 but we know that the Phœnicians reached Britain, and there is reason to believe that the Carthaginians discovered the Sargasso Sea off the west coast of Africa, and that Hanno the Carthaginian, about 500 B.C., penetrated as far south as the Gambia. Herodotus states that Necho II, King of Egypt about 600 B.C., sent certain Phœnician sailors to go down the Red Sea and along the east coast of Africa, and that in the third year they came back by the Pillars of Hercules and reached Egypt by the Mediterranean, reporting that as they sailed round Africa, after a time they had the sun on their right hand—that is, to the north—which Herodotus does not believe possible; but the observation as to the sun is very convincing. It is doubtful whether the circumnavigation was ever repeated until Vasco da Gama, two thousand years later, in the fifteenth century, doubled the Cape of Good Hope from the west. It is unnecessary to trace all the stages2 in the accumulation of this earliest knowledge of the sea: they may be illustrated by three examples selected from the writings and 1It is thought that Marinus of Tyre, the first really scientific geographer, who lived towards the close of the first century A.D., in the time of Trajan and Hadrian, made use of the store of geographic and hydrographic knowledge accumulated by the Phœnicians in the construction of his improved maps; and that Ptolemy of Pelusium in turn founded his geographical work upon the maps of Marinus. 2A very full account will be found in Sir John Murray’s “Summary” in the “Challenger” Reports, which I have used freely. 3 maps of the ancients. First, the traditional voyages which are crystallized in the mythical adventures of Jason in the Argo, and of the world as known to Homer (say, 1000 B.C.), and may also be represented by the map of Hecatæus (about 500 B.C.), showing the great river-like “Oceanus” surrounding the known lands bordering the Mediterranean (see Plate I)—a poetical misrepresentation, which was corrected by Herodotus in the following century.