DEPARTMENT OF MARINE BIOLOGY.* 



Alfkeu Ci. Mayer, Director. 



\Vlien the year began the prospects of the Department were never 

 brighter, in the whole course of its past history, for the Trustees had 

 generously authorized the expedition to Torres Strait, Australia; yet 

 even before the month of January had passed the Department suffered 

 an irreparable loss in the sudden death of George Harold Drew on 

 the 29th day of the month. It was our hope that he might continue 

 in the tropical Pacific the work he had so ably performed in the 

 Atlantic, wherein he demonstrated that much, and indeed perhaps 

 most, of the so-called coral mud of tropical reef regions is in fact not 

 due to corals, but that it has been precipitated through the agency 

 of a bacillus which is very abundant in the surface waters of the 

 tropical Atlantic and which denitrifies the ocean, reducing the nitrates 

 to nitrites and finally expelling nitrogen gas from the water. This 

 action results in causing the calcium to combine with the carbon 

 dioxide to form finely divided colloidal calcium carbonate. We do 

 not yet know how universal this action may be, and it was Drew's 

 expectation and our own that he might continue the investigation 

 until all the great oceans had been studied, but death has dashed 

 our hopes and the work of one of England's ablest young men of 

 science has been completed in so far as his own effort to advance 

 it is concerned. 



Mr. Drew had just been appointed a Research Associate of the 

 Department when death terminated his labors. We mourn him as 

 a warm-hearted, cultured friend; one of civilization's finest products, 

 and an ornament to the science of Cambridge University, his alma 

 mater. Had he lived his name would have become great in science, 

 but even as it is his life and service stand as an inspiration to us all, 

 and our sense of loss is tempered by an appreciation of the culture 

 that developed him and of the great nation of whose civihzation he 

 was but a product. 



Another serious check was also destined to fall upon the Depart- 

 ment, for the investigator, for the advancement of whose studies the 

 Australian expedition had been especially planned, failed temporarily 

 in health and has been forced to abandon the expedition. The ex- 

 pedition, however, goes forward, and D. H. Tennent, Hubert Lyman 

 Clark, E. Newton Harvey, Frank M. Potts, of Cambridge, the Direc- 

 tor, and our engineer, Mr. John Mills, started from San Francisco 

 on July 23 and arrived at Thursday Island, Torres Strait, on Sep- 

 tember 1, and will there establish a temporary laboratory. 



*Situated at Tortugas, Florida. Grant No. 863. $31,890 for investigations and main- 

 tenance during 1913. (For previous reports see Year Books Nog. 3-11.) 



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