Oceanography

Oceanography. The sea as a physical, chemical, and biological system. The anchor is the voyage of HMS Challenger, 1872 to 1876 — sixty-nine thousand nautical miles, 492 deep soundings, 133 dredges, and a fifty-volume Report published between 1880 and 1895 which founded the discipline very nearly by exhausting it, describing some 4,700 new species and establishing that life exists at all depths. Luigi Marsigli’s Histoire physique de la mer of 1725 is the first integrated treatment of a sea as a physical system and is defensible as the true first; Maury’s of 1855 is the first textbook. The word dates from 1859.