THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



SEPTEMBER, 1901. 



THE GREATEST BIOLOGICAL STATIOX 

 IX THE WORLD.* 



By Professor W. a. HERDMAX, F.R.S., 



UNIVERSITY COLLEGE,- LIVERPOOL. 



T3I0L0GICAL, Zoological, Marine Stations are all of them merely 

 -'— ^ the seaside workshops of the modern naturalist Svrit large.' 

 But they offer wonderful facilities for the most advanced and best 

 kinds of biological work and it is almost impossible to overestimate the 

 influence they have had in the advancement of our knowledge of living 

 nature. The field-naturalist of old, before the days of college 

 laboratories, studied his animals and plants alive in the open, or col- 

 lected and arranged them in his cabinets and museums. The work was 

 interesting and necessary, but to some extent superficial. We see its 

 importance enhanced in these later days in the light of Darwinism. It 

 Avas an enormous gain to science when zoological and botanical labo- 

 ratories were equipped in the universities, and when every student came 

 to examine everything for himself and to probe as deeply as possible 

 into structure and function. It is no wonder if for a time, in some 

 •quarters, in the fascinations of microscopic dissection and section- 

 cutting and mounting, there was perhaps a tendency to lose sight of 

 living nature, and to convert refinement of method and beauty of prep- 

 aration into the end, in place of being only the means of the in- 

 vestigation. 



The biological station came to put all that right. It presented a 

 happy union of the observational work of the field-naturalist with the 

 minute investigations of the laboratory student. It brought the labo- 

 ratory to the seashore, and the sea, in the form of well-equipped healthy 



* From notes taken on a recent visit to the Zoological Station at Naples. 



