{"id":672,"date":"2013-06-28T14:35:21","date_gmt":"2013-06-28T14:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/towardsdolly.wordpress.com\/?p=672"},"modified":"2013-09-23T10:18:38","modified_gmt":"2013-09-23T10:18:38","slug":"letters-in-the-limelight-william-herdman-and-hms-challengers-weird-deep-sea-forms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/2013\/06\/28\/letters-in-the-limelight-william-herdman-and-hms-challengers-weird-deep-sea-forms\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters in the Limelight: William Herdman and HMS Challenger’s ‘weird deep sea forms’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Coll.14.9.21.13<\/a>Cataloguing the correspondence of zoologist\/animal breeder James Cossar Ewart (1851-1933), I have been intrigued by the various \u2018life stories\u2019 which emerge from the letters. Periodically I will be including some highlights in a series of posts entitled \u2018letters in the limelight\u2019 .<\/em><\/p>\n

Last week\u2019s \u2018Letters in the Limelight\u2019 focused on Dorothy Thursby-Pelham\u2019s drawings of penguin embryos from Captain Scott\u2019s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic; this week, we are staying with the theme of exploration by looking at a letter (dated 25 June 1915) to Ewart from the Edinburgh-born zoologist and oceanographer Sir William Abbott Herdman (1858-1924). Ewart had evidently written to Herdman, who was then Professor of Natural History at the University of Liverpool, requesting some biographical details, to which Herdman modestly replied: \u2018what an awful question you ask me! What on earth am I to say? I am the last person who ought to answer it. Will Who\u2019s Who<\/i> not supply what you want? However I suppose I must help you with any facts I can think of\u2026\u2019 He manages to recover from his reticence sufficiently to provide a brief career history, although he is careful to stress that \u2018I had nothing to do of course with the Challenger expedition<\/i> \u2013 was a school-boy at the Edin[burgh] Academy at the time; but I was one of Wyville Thomson\u2019s young men at the \u2018Challenger Office\u2019 after he came home.\u2019<\/p>\n

Herdman of course refers to the HMS Challenger<\/i> expedition which visited all of the world\u2019s oceans except the Arctic between\u00a0 1872 and 1876. The expedition aimed primarily to determine deep sea physical conditions such as temperature and ocean currents, although other forms of investigation, including those of a biological nature, were also carried out. In charge of the scientific staff on board was Charles Wyville Thompson (1830-1882), whom Ewart was to succeed as Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh. Thompson\u2019s location decided that the \u2018Challenger Office\u2019 mentioned by Herdman was set up in Edinburgh in order to analyse the findings of the expedition. The resulting Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of HMS Challenger<\/i> was as monumental as the trip itself, appearing in 50 volumes up until 1895, and much of the scientific data gathered by the Expedition is still in current use.<\/p>\n

As Herdman writes to Ewart, he became involved in Wyville Thomson\u2019s \u2018Challenger Office\u2019 after graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 1879. He was given the collection of Tunicata (a group of marine organisms) to investigate, a work which he continued after he departed for Liverpool in 1881, and which was to be published as a report in three parts between 1882 and 1888. It was research that he evidently enjoyed: he wrote to Ewart of his \u2018luck to have a lot of weird deep sea forms to describe which were of course new to science, so I was able to add some new morphological facts.\u2019 Herdman remained in Liverpool for the rest of his career, maintaining a room in the Department of Zoology far beyond his retirement. He was also a generous benefactor to the University of Liverpool, endowing two chairs and funding a geological laboratory. He established biological stations on Anglesey, in Barrow, Lancashire and on the Isle of Man, where he also helped to found the Manx Museum in Douglas. He received honorary degrees from several universities, was actively involved with the Royal Society and was knighted in 1922. However, Herdman\u2019s personal life was marred with sadness when his only son was killed in the Somme and his wife died suddenly after a two-day illness. Herdman himself suffered from heart disease, and died on the eve of his daughter\u2019s wedding, after attending a family dinner in London. His obituary in Nature<\/i> (2857, 114, 02 August 1924) states that \u2018Sir William Herdman\u2019s life, if it is ever written, will be an inspiration to every man, whether he is interested in science or not.\u2019 In his own life summary which he provided to Ewart however, Herdman retains his characteristic self-deprecation, concluding the letter thus:\u00a0 \u2018Oh \u2013 finally, I have probably made quite as many mistakes as any other zoologist who has ranged over a pretty wide field of work.\u2019<\/p>\n

Edinburgh University Library Special Collections also holds the HMS Challenger<\/em> Papers: http:\/\/www.archives.lib.ed.ac.uk\/catalogue\/cs\/viewcat.pl?id=GB-237-Coll-46&view=basic<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cataloguing the correspondence of zoologist\/animal breeder James Cossar Ewart (1851-1933), I have been intrigued by the various \u2018life stories\u2019 which emerge from the letters. Periodically I will be including some highlights in a series of posts entitled \u2018letters in the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2,116],"tags":[22,50,51,53,61,62,73,104,107,108,111],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p40Aqf-aQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":811,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions\/811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/towardsdolly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}