THE RHYTHMIC UNIVERSE 



UNLESS a modern biologist, who tends to be concerned 

 exclusively with the ultra-fine structure of genes and 

 the feed-back mechanisms of hormones, has a broader 

 outlook fostered by an acquaintance with the humanities and 

 a sturdy philosophy, the world becomes a strange unreal uni- 

 verse, apparently far removed from the world he once knew. 

 This broader view of the universe can have many rewarding 

 moments, such as those experienced by this writer while visiting 

 the laboratories of Dr. Frank A. Brown, Jr., at the Marine 

 Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in the 

 summer of 1959. Immediately one felt the impact of a research 

 that was as close to the sea as the laboratory itself. Other 

 laboratories at the famed MBL had electron miscroscopes, 

 television microscopes, radiation scalers, and unique and sophis- 

 ticated apparatus of various sorts; but here in the Brown 

 laboratory one found much simple, home-made equipment, with 

 intact animals going through their paces before a group of 

 trained observers. 



Huge water baths regulated the temperature of glass respi- 

 rometers which housed crabs with their whole oxygen supply 

 contained in plastic bags. Their every breath was registered 

 by automatic recording devices. In another room, snails glided 

 over a marked course, all unaware that their meanderings were 

 being suggested by the motion of magnets manipulated by 

 researchers underneath their experimental platform. Fiddler 

 crabs in a photographic darkroom regularly changed the color 

 of their skin just as though they were still at home on their 

 native beaches, becoming white at night and dark in the day- 

 time, seeming to possess some sort of magic insight into an 

 outer world from which they were completely isolated. Clams 

 opened and closed their shells according to a set rhythm and 

 made recordings of their activities on special devices, while 



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