CHAPTER XII 



THE DRIFTING SWARMS 



WHEN, in the middle of the last century, 

 Johannes Peter Miiller (1801-58), the German 

 physiologist and comparative anatomist, devel- 

 oped a method of straining plant and animal life from 

 sea water with a fine net, he was only doing what the 

 whale had been doing for countless centuries, and far 

 more efficiently. But Miiller opened up a new world of 

 teeming life : the world of plankton. 



Naturalists in many countries were quick to realize the 

 possibilities of the new realm's exploration. It was as if 

 mankind had remained in almost complete darkness 

 regarding the constitution of the oceans and had emerged 

 into blinding light. To realize what had happened one 

 should try to imagine a world in which man knew nothing 

 of insects, having investigated the structures and lives of 

 all kinds of animals in complete ignorance of the fact 

 that ants, bees, butterffies and similar creatures existed : 

 and had suddenly discovered the insect kingdom, with 

 its swarming millions of curious and colourful life forms. 

 For the world of plankton is at least as large as the insect 

 world, and its inhabitants are at least as diversified. 



Collections of plankton were at first made in the 

 more easily accessible shore-waters. Miiller's researches 

 attracted the attention of the scientific world, and stimu- 

 lated interest in the plankton, but he was not the first to 

 investigate them, nor even to use the tow-net in securing 

 specimens, although he is stated to be the first user of 

 the net in nearly all modern text-books on oceanography. 



J. Vaughan Thompson, the brilHant British amateur 



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