4oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Pig. 3. Cocoanut Grove near the Tortugas Laboratory. 



mainly upon a rich and varied fauna, but upon the presence of animals 

 which may be found in abundance in its immediate neighborhood, and 

 which provide favorable subjects for experimental studies. 



When we contemplate the vast numbers of so-called researches pub- 

 lished every year, it becomes evident that science will be advanced more 

 surely by improving the quality of these papers than by increasing their 

 bulk. For a generation the civilized nations of the world have at great 

 expense maintained experiment stations to improve the breed of plants 

 and animals useful to man, but nearly all of them have labored under 

 the false impression that researches can be produced at stated intervals. 

 Much of that freedom so essential for research was sacrificed to the 

 production of bulky annual reports restricted to the accounts of 

 "purely practical " studies. It was not an accident that Mendel, labor- 

 ing obscurely in his cloister garden and with no thought save but for 

 nature and her ways, discovered the law of heredity which all the experi- 

 ment stations in the world failed to find. 



Anton Dohrn did well for science when he gave his fortune to build 

 the Naples Laboratory, but he did far better when he granted to those 

 who labored there unlimited time and boundless freedom in thought 

 and action, and his confidence was rewarded, for at Naples have been 

 produced many of the greatest papers known to biological science. 



Concentrating its efforts solely upon research, the Tortugas is in no 

 sense the rival of other/ educational institutions, its simple object 

 being to supplement and extend the work which others are attempting, 



