522 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the Columbian Field Museum, and especially of the New York Botan- 

 ical Garden, have recently made extensive collections in the continental 

 and Antillean portions of the American tropics. But facilities have been 

 lacking for working out the life-histories or the physiology and ecology 

 of tropical and subtropical seaweeds, as this has been done at Naples and 

 Ceylon ; the chance has been wanting to select, study and carefully pre- 

 serve developmental stages of tropical mosses, ferns and seed plants, and 

 to make investigations of the physiology of growth, nutrition and other 

 activities of plants near the equator, as these have been made at Buiten- 

 zorg. This sort of opportunity for studying tropical plants where they 

 must be studied — in their tropical surroundings — has seldom been 

 offered to American investigators until within the last decade. The more 

 or less temporary summer laboratories established in the western tropics 

 have been located directly upon the seacoast, primarily with a view to 

 their fitness for zoological work. They have usually proved unattrac- 

 tive to botanists engaged in studies other than those upon marine algae. 

 This has been largely true of the summer laboratories established by the 

 Johns Hopkins University in the Bahamas and Jamaica, by Harvard 

 University in Bermuda and by the Carnegie Institution on the Dry Tor- 

 tugas. It is evident, therefore, that for many kinds of botanical research 

 a laboratory must be established at a site selected with these in view — in 

 other words, it must be primarily a botanical station. 



A serious attempt to arrange for the establishment of an American 

 tropical laboratory was made by certain of the botanists of this country 

 in 1897. The desirability of such a laboratory was pointed out by The 

 Botanical Gazette, and a commission composed of D. T. MacDougal, D. 

 H. Campbell, J. M. Coulter and W. G. Farlow was chosen to select a site. 

 This Tropical Laboratory Commission, after profiting by such informa- 

 tion and suggestions as they could obtain, and after two of its members, 

 Drs. MacDougal and Campbell, had visited Jamaica in 1897, was in- 

 clined to favor that island as the location for the laboratory. During the 

 presence of these two commissioners in Jamaica they were aided by Hon. 

 William Fawcett, late director of Public Gardens and Plantations, Wil- 

 liam Harris, superintendent of Public Gardens and Plantations and Pro- 

 fessor James E. Humphrey, of the Johns Hopkins University, who was at 

 this time in charge of the Johns Hopkins Laboratory, established at Port 

 Antonio. The sad fate of Professor Humphrey and of that promising 

 young zoologist Franklin Story Conant, as victims of the unwonted 

 visitation of yellow fever to Jamaica, undoubtedly checked the enthusi- 

 asm of many who had been interested in establishing a tropical labora- 

 tory. The anticipated encouragement and cooperation were not given to 

 the commission, and, in consequence, the search for a site and all further 

 work on the project were, for the time, abandoned. The project was not 

 again taken up by American botanists or institutions during the follow- 

 ing six years. 



