MURRAY, GEORGE ROBERT MILNE

(b. Arbroath, Scotland, 11 November 1858; d. Stonehaven, Scotland, 16 December 1911)

botany.

Murray was one of eight children born to George and Helen Margaret Murray. He was educated in Arbroath until 1875, when he spent a year in Strasbourg studying under Anton de Bary. In 1876 he became an assistant in the botany department of the British Museum, where he was put in charge of the cryptogamic collections. He spent the rest of his career in this department, becoming Keeper in 1895. His early research was in mycology, and was of sufficient taxonomic interest to result in his election as fellow of the Linnean Society in 1878, before he was twenty-one, and an ivitation to write an article on fungi for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1879. The natural history departments of the British Museum moved to South Kensington in 1881, and Murray was responsible for the transfer of the cryptogams, reorganization of the herbarium, and later devel- opment of the section.

Murray always maintained his links with Scotland and worked there during vacations, investigating salmon disease and collecting diatoms and pelagic algae from the sea and the lochs while on board the Fishery Board’s vessel Garland. New techniques in trawling for phytoplankton by pumping water through fine silk nets allowed him to study seasonal variations in forms; he taught these methods to captains of trawlers, who then collected for him in the course of their normal business. His work on the reproduction of diatoms by asexual spore formation was published in 1897. Working with Biddulphia spp., Chaetoceros spp., and Coscinodiscus concinnus, he showed that small specimens growing inside the shells of adult forms were not only a means of rejuvenating those individuals, but might divide into two, four, or eight new individuals, which would eventually be released and grow to full size.

Murray was associated with several expeditions, generally sponsored by the museum. In 1886 he visited the West Indies as a naturalist attached to the solar eclipse expedition, and in 1888 he sorted the algae and fungi from the expedition to Fernando de Noronha, and wrote those sections of the report. He was secretary to the West Indies exploration committee from 1891, and in 1897 he returned there on the Para to visit Barbados, Haiti, Jamaica, and Panama, collecting particularly Coccosphaera, a hitherto little-known unicellular alga. He differentiated the species, and showed how the cover of overlapping calcareous scales, arranged in a definite order, provide defensive armor while still allowing for growth, an evolutionary advance on the structure of diatoms.

In 1898 he organized an expedition under the Royal Geographic Society in the Oceana to collect material in an area off the coast of Ireland where the sea bed dropped steeply. He was also scientific director of the Discovery expedition of 1901, but sailed only as far as Cape Town. He organized the ship’s stores and apparatus, and edited The Antarctic Manual for the expedition, writing a brief section, “Notes on Botany and How to Collect Specimens."

In 1884 he married Helen Welsh; they had one son and one daughter. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1897. In 1905 he retired because of ill health and returned to Scotland.

Massee named the new fungal species Schizophyllum murrayi after Murray.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Murray published approximately forty papers on cryptogams and oceanography, in which he described new species, surveyed distribution, and listed specimens in the British Museum collections. Many of these papers appeared in Journal of Botany, British and Foreign. His reports on the work of the botany department from 1895 to 1903 appeared in Journal of Botany. His other works include the section on fungi in A. Henfrey, ed., An Elementary Course of Botany, 3rd ed. (London, 1878), 455–472; 4th ed. (London, 1884), 428–449; A Handbook of Cryptogamic Botany (London, 1889), written with A. W. Bennett; two articles, “Algae”and “Fungi,”in The natural history of the Island of Ferdinand de Noronha, bosed on the Collections made by the … Expedition of 1887 (London, 1890), 75–81, extracted from Journal of the Linnean Soeiety, Botany, 26 (1888), 1–95, and ibid., Zoology, 20 (1888), 473–570; Phycological Memoirs, pts. I-III (London, 1892–1895), edited by Murray; Introduction to the Study of Seaweeds (London, 1895); “Report of Observations on Plant Plankton,”in Edinburgh Fisheries Board Report, 15 (1897), pt. 3, 212–218; Report of the Lords Commissioners of H.M. Treasury of the Departmental Committee on the Botanical Work and Collections at the British Museum and at Kew … 1901, questions 1–198 (London, 1901), 1–13; and The Antarctic Manual (London, 1901), edited by Murray.

His scientific papers may be traced through the Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers, XVII, 429–430. Papers mentioned in the text are “On the Reproduction of Some Marine Diatoms,”in Proceedings of the Royal Socie- ty of Edinburgh, 21 (1897), 207–218; and “On the Nature of the Coccospheres and Rhabdospheres,”in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 190B (1898), 427–441, plus 2 plates, written with V. H. Blackman.

II. Secondary Literature. The most useful obituary is James Britten, in Journal of Botany, 50 (1912), 73–75. There is also an obituary by K.F. and W.C., in Proceedings of the Royal Soeiety, B86 (1913), xxi-xxiii; and the entry by G. S. Boulger, in Sidney Lee, ed., Dictionary of National Biography, supp. 1901–1911 (Oxford, 1912), 667–668.

Diana M. Simpkins