Laguna Ratine Laboratory n 



There have been constantly in our minds the possibilities that 

 such a laboratory might have for advanced college students. Having 

 become thoroughly convinced of the immense importance and useful- 

 ness in the last years of a college course, of what we have been calling 

 "junior research work," and having been long aware of the tremen- 

 dous effectiveness of "living interest" as a pedagogical tool, we have 

 done our utmost to give advanced students the opportunity to try out 

 their several abilities and capacities in scientific methods of thought 

 and work, on some simple little piece of live investigation that they 

 might easily carry through by faithful effort. The response to these 

 great opportunities among our students, has been little short of 

 marvellous. Advanced students of some special ability and capacity 

 have constantly sought these opportunities and given to them unlim- 

 ited amounts of time and energy largely in their own outside free 

 hours, and usually without college credits. Their results have, as a 

 rule, been highly commendable. For instance, the work by Hall on 

 Acarina, Crawford on the Psyllidae and Thysanoptera, and Metz on 

 the bees, is (according to some of the best authorities in this country 

 and Europe) as good as any work of the same sort ever done in this 

 country, and in some respects better. 



Uniformly we have encountered a great purpose on the part of 

 the students to make their work "as good or better than anything 

 done before" this has been their working principle. Naturally there 

 would never be time here to develop anything more than simply some 

 promise of their possibilities. Even when their maiden efforts are 

 not so admirable, every day sees great and steady growth with 

 inevitable response to the great ideals of endeavor which seem to 

 permeate everything at Pomona. One of our students who has been 

 a constant contributor to the Pomona Journal of Entomology for 

 several years, still shows striking improvement in every article pub- 

 lished, and this spirit of "getting better all the time" the spirit of 

 "going on," has characterized all of this "junior research work." 

 In the face of such spirit as this, it may be imagined that our profes- 

 sors have spared no effort to furnish opportunities where they were 

 earnestly sought by capable students. Our college curriculum being 

 a crowded one, we had early conceived the idea of a summer marine 

 laboratory, and have worked steadily towards it, with the result of 

 its partial materialization in 1911. 



