Thomson was born at Bonsyde, in Linlithgow, West Lothian, on 5 March 1830, the son of Andrew Thomson, a surgeon in the service of the East India Company, and his wife Sarah Ann Drummond Smith. He was baptised Wyville Thomas Charles Thomson, but changed his name formally upon being knighted in 1876.[3][1]
In 1860 was transferred to the chair of natural history at the same institution. In 1868 he assumed the duties of professor of botany at the Royal College of Science, Dublin, and finally in 1870 he received the natural history chair at the University of Edinburgh.[4] Here he taught Arthur Conan Doyle.[5]
In 1871–72 he served as President of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh.[6]
Interests
Thomson is remembered for his studies of the biological conditions of the deep seas. Being interested in crinoids, and prompted by the results of the dredgings of Michael Sars in the deep sea off the Norwegian coasts, he persuaded the Royal Navy to grant him use of HMS Lightning and HMS Porcupine for deep sea dredging expeditions in the summers of 1868 and 1869. They showed that animal life existed down to depths of 650 fathoms (1200 m), that all marine invertebrate groups are present at this depth, and that deep-sea temperatures are not as constant as had been supposed, but vary considerably, and indicate oceanic circulation. These results were described in The Depths of the Sea, which he published in 1873.[4]
The remarkable hydrographic and zoological results which Thomson had demonstrated, in addition to the growing demands of ocean telegraphy, soon led to the Royal Navy to grant use of HMS Challenger for a global expedition. Wyville Thomson was selected as chief scientist, and the ship sailed on 23 December 1872.[7]
Aftermath
The Challenger expedition was deemed a great success, and on his return Thomson received a number of academic honours, as well as a knighthood. In 1877 he published in two volumes The Voyage of the Challenger – The Atlantic, a preliminary account of the results of the voyage. He spent the next two years working on administrative duties connected with the publication of the full monograph of the voyage. Thomson had a highly strung mentality, and his health was generally poor throughout his life. He found dealing with publishers in the course of completing the full reports of the voyage to be enormously stressful. In 1879 he ceased to perform his university duties, gave up overseeing the reports of the expedition in 1881 (after publishing the introduction to the zoological series in 1880),[1] then took to his bed and died a broken man at Bonsyde on 10 March 1882.[4] Thomson's friend and colleague Sir John Murray took over the publication of the reports; they eventually spanned 50 volumes, the last of which was issued in 1895.[1]
Thomson's headstone in St. Michael's Parish Churchyard.
Thomson had criticised natural selection, stating it was not enough to explain the evolution of species. Replying in the Nature journal, Charles Darwin commented that "I am sorry to find that Sir Wyville Thomson does not under stand the principle of natural selection, as explained by Mr. Wallace and myself... Can Sir Wyville Thomson name any one who has said that the evolution of species depends only on natural selection?"[8]
^Doyle, A. C. (1924). "Recollections of a Student". Memories and Adventures. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. p. 19. OCLC1367896. They were remarkable men, however, some of these professors, and we managed to know them pretty well ... There was Wyville Thomson, the zoologist, fresh from his Challenger expedition, ...
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