MODERNBIOLOGY 4^3 



in a number of important works. In 1849 he was appointed professor in Hel- 

 singfors, where he laboured until his death, in 1866. In his old age he be- 

 came an original character, and nothing of his later production achieved 

 the fame of his early work. 



The epoch now under discussion was on the whole prolific in bio- 

 logical students of high distinction; in the foregoing it has been possible to 

 name only a few of those who took a prominent part in furthering the de- 

 velopment of the science in particular branches; we shall now mention a 

 further group of important scientists who made a special study of marine 

 research and, above all, investigated the hitherto practically untouched 

 lower animal world of the ocean. Scandinavia was at the time one of the 

 main quarters of Europe in which interest was awakened in marine biology. 

 As one of its original promoters the Norwegian Michael Sars is worthy of 

 mention. Born in 1805, he studied theology and became a priest on the west 

 coast of Norway. There he began to interest himself in marine animal life 

 and published his observations in a couple of treatises, which attracted 

 widespread attention. He continued to follow the course he had thus entered 

 upon, and in 1854 he became professor of zoology in Christiania, where he 

 worked until his death, in 1869. Among his valuable contributions may 

 be mentioned the discovery of metamorphosis in the marine Mollusca, his 

 observations of the Crinoidea that are found at great ocean-depths and his 

 establishing their likeness to large groups of similar animals from earlier 

 epochs. He was a pioneer in introducing marine research into Scandinavia. 



In Sweden the study of marine animal life was taken up by Sven Ludvig 

 LovEN. Born in Stockholm in 1809, he studied in Lund, where he took his 

 degree, and in Berlin under Rudolphi and Ehrenberg, made a journey of 

 exploration to Spitsbergen in a fishing-sloop — the first of the many voyages 

 of polar exploration that have started from Sweden — and finally became 

 curator of the zoological department of the State museum in Stockholm, 

 where he laboured for over fifty years. He died in 1895. He very greatly 

 enriched the museum's collections and founded Sweden's zoological marine 

 laboratory at Kristineberg. 



Of Loven's observations, most frequently published in the proceedings of 

 the Swedish Academy of Science, may be mentioned his investigation of the 

 metamorphosis of the Annelida — the name "Loven's larva" still recalls 

 the fact — his study of the evolution of the genus Campanularia, which 

 provided Steenstrup with one of his ideas for the alternation-of-generations 

 theory, and, above all, his investigations into the evolution of the marine 

 Mollusca, in the course of which he established the formation of the so- 

 called polar bodies and their expulsion from the egg — a phenomenon the 

 evolutional universality of which was not determined until a long time 

 afterwards. He was especially interested in the embryology of the lovser 



