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 House, in accordance with the recommendation of a select committee of the House of Commons made in 1835.

Thomson found in 1836 that his official labours, combined with the long night sittings of the House of Commons, seriously affected his health. In consequence in August 1839 he accepted the post of governor-general of Canada. His administration began at a critical period in Canadian history, and his first duty was to carry out the policy suggested in the report of his predecessor, Lord Durham [see, first ], by effecting a union of the provinces and establishing a new constitution for their future government. This delicate and difficult task, in which the diverse interests of the Upper and Lower Provinces had to be reconciled, was accomplished by Thomson with great skill and courage. The new constitution, after being carried through the colonial parliaments and ratified by the House of Commons, came into force on 10 Feb. 1841. It led ultimately to the great confederation of 1867. In addition to this measure he carried another for local government, and he set on foot improvements in the matters of emigration, education, and public works. In recognition of his services he was on 19 Aug. 1840 raised to the peerage as Baron Sydenham of Sydenham in Kent and Toronto in Canada, and was appointed knight grand cross of the order of the Bath. When preparing to return home he met with a fatal accident on 4 Sept. 1841 while riding near Kingston, and died, unmarried, at his residence, Alwington House, Kingston, on the 19th of the same month. He was buried at Kingston. Charles Greville, in his ‘Memoirs,’ devotes a curious passage to Thomson's complacency. In spite of his vanity he had many admirable qualities: tact, judgment, and prudence, firmness and decision, indefatigable and well-ordered application, and, above all, a disinterested devotion to the service of his country. Some rather ill-natured observations on Thomson are given in Sir John Bowring's ‘Autobiographical Recollections’ (p. 301, 1877).

His portrait, by S. W. Reynolds, painted in 1833, appeared in the third Exhibition of National Portraits, 1868. It was then in possession of his brother, George Poulett Scrope, and was engraved in his memoir of Sydenham.

[Memoirs of Charles, Lord Sydenham, by his brother, G. Poulett Scrope, 1843; Gent. Mag. 1841, ii. 650; Athenæum, 29 July, 5 Aug. 1843; Greville Memoirs, ii. 219, iii. 330; Burke's Dormant and Extinct Peerage, 1866, p. 531; Winsor's Hist. of America, 1889, viii. 162; Todd's Parliamentary Government in the British Colonies, 1880, p. 55; Walpole's Life of Lord J. Russell, 1889; Prentice's Hist. of the Anti-Corn Law League, 1853, i. 20; Réveillaud, Histoire du Canada, p. 374 (adverse view of Thomson).]  THOMSON, CHARLES WYVILLE (1830–1882), naturalist, son of Andrew Thomson, surgeon in the East India Company's service, was born at Bonsyde, Linlithgow, on 5 March 1830. His baptismal name was Wyville Thomas Charles, and the change was formally made when he was gazetted as knight. He was educated first at Merchiston Castle school, and then at the university of Edinburgh, attending the classes in medicine. His aptitude for natural science showed first in the direction of botany, and was so marked that in 1850 he was appointed lecturer on botany at King's College, Aberdeen, and in the following year professor in the same subject at Marischal College. But in 1853 his field of work was enlarged by his appointment to the chair of natural history in Queen's College, Cork, and by his removal in the following year to that of mineralogy and geology at Queen's College, Belfast, where, in 1860, he was transferred to the professorship of natural science. To this post in 1868 was added that of professor of botany to the Royal College of Science, Dublin. His last removal was in 1870 to the professorship of natural history in the university of Edinburgh.

Some years before he had turned his mind to questions relating to the distribution of life and the physical conditions in the deeper parts of the ocean, to which attention had already been directed by Dr. G. C. Wallich, who in 1860 accompanied the Bulldog in a sounding voyage across the North Atlantic. Dr. William Benjamin Carpenter [q. v.] was also keenly interested in similar questions, and ultimately the matter was taken up by the Royal Society, with the result that in the summer of 1868 the two naturalists, on board the gunboat Lightning, made a series of investigations to the north of Scotland as far as the Faroe Islands. The work was continued in the following year, with the aid of John Gwyn Jeffreys [q. v.], on board her majesty's ship Porcupine, off the west coast of Ireland, in the Bay of Biscay, and to the north of Scotland, and an expedition was made to the Mediterranean in 1870, which Thomson, owing to an illness, could not accompany. He described the general results of these researches in a volume published in 1873, and entitled ‘The Depths of the Sea.’

These cruises, however, were only preliminary to an investigation on a much more extended scale. They had proved so fruitful and suggestive that the government was