Japanese Biologists 



Mitsukuri, Isao lijima, Sho Watase, Chiyomatsu 

 Ishikawa, K. Kishinouye, and H. Nakagawa-- being 

 also included as guests. Dr. lijima, after Mitsukuri 

 the leading naturalist of Japan, and also his lifelong 

 associate and friend, was a student of Edward S. 

 Morse. 1 Watase, a morphologist who had worked 

 under Brooks at Johns Hopkins, was for some time 

 professor in the University of Chicago. Ishikawa 

 had written an important memoir on the fishes of 

 Lake Biwa, Kishinouye was a fishery expert, Naka- 

 gawa a student of insects. 



Our trip led to the Tamagawa or "Jewel" River, Cormorant 

 a clear, swift stream with wide flood-plain of coarse 

 gravel, where fishing by cormorants is made a 

 specialty. Four birds, each with a harness about its 

 body and a rubber band at the base of the neck to 

 keep it from swallowing the catch, showed amazing 

 skill at their trade. Two boys drew a low net along 

 the river to drive the fish ahead, while the cormo- 

 rants, led by a third lad, swam in front, diving for 

 prey. When a bird's pouch filled up he was shaken 

 over a basket, and thus disgorged with little cere- 

 mony. Watching the process, Mitsukuri said: "You 

 can see by the looks of that cormorant how Japan 

 felt when she was made to give up Port Arthur." 



1 lijima was not only a morphologist of high rank, but an outdoor naturalist 

 as well, and a noted popularizer of science. Near the Misaki Seaside Laboratory 

 where he spent his summers are the great ocean depths of Okinose four miles 

 from which Kuma Aoki, his man, brought him the rarest of glass-sponges, on 

 which wonderful but little-known group he was the chief authority. Of them he 

 described many new forms, even new families, in a region where, in the words 

 of Dr. Bashford Dean, "Nature seemed to have taken many pains to keep them 

 alive in an early geological garden." His death occurred in 1920. 



It was at lijima's initiative that means were devised to force the pearl 

 oyster to produce "culture pearls" by artificial irritation of the mantle or out- 

 side skin under the shell. These globules, often very beautiful, are now well 

 known in commerce. In substance they are the same as true pearls, the latter 

 being the result of intrusion by minute parasitic worms. 



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