4 BULLETIN 15 8, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



first answer is suggested by a perusal of the notes and records made 

 by Doctor Eathbun and his associates. They were exceptionally 

 thorough in their search, and their task w\as accomplished long be- 

 fore the introduction of any agitation in reference to an 8-hour 

 working-day. Several of the hauls with both the trawl and the 

 townet are recorded as having been made as early as at 4.30 o'clock 

 in the morning, while others came as late as 9.30 in the evening on 

 the same day. Evidently in the interests of science a 17-hour day 

 was not deemed impossible by those enthusiasts. Casual hauls made 

 during the ordinary working hours might well fail to include certain 

 species that could be obtained early in the morning or late in the 

 evening. 



A second and far more potent answer to the question is to be 

 found in the use of a device designated as " trawl wings." Many of 

 the species in the present list that are new to the Woods Hole region 

 were captured in the trawl wings. It becomes, therefore, of scien- 

 tific interest to know what this device was and how it was used. 

 Doctor Rathbun has clearly explained this in a manuscript entitled 

 "Manual of Collecting," which was compiled shortly after the 

 copepods were collected but was never published. It still remains 

 in the possession of the United States National Museum, and from it 

 the following is quoted : 



Tratvl wings. — It is now customary in the dredging work of the Fish Com- 

 mission to use two winglike attachments to tlie beam trawl. These trawl 

 wings, as they are called, consist of a bag-shaped and rather coarse net, at- 

 tached to a rectangular iron frame, suspended from a bar on each side of the 

 trawl, and in which, when in use, a fine towing net is inserted. The object of 

 the trawl wings is to afford a means of capturing the small free-swimming 

 animals, which often live in extreme abundance just above the bottom, and 

 which, when taken in the trawl net proper, are washed through the coarse 

 meshes, or lost sight of in the heterogeneous mass of large specimens mingled 

 with the bottom mud and sand. The quantity of fine material brought up by 

 the wings is frequently surprising, especially to one who has never seen them 

 used before, and the slight additional expense of supplying them will cei*tahily 

 be repaid to the collector many times over. 



As an instance of their value the writer will say that he has rarely seen 

 a specimen of free-swimming copepod brought up from deep water in either 

 the dredge or beam trawl proper, while from a single haul of the trawl wings in 

 depths of 100 to 1,000 fathoms, it has been no uncommon occurrence to obtain 

 from one-fourth to one-half a pint of clear copepods mingled with other forms 

 of small crustaceans, both adult and larval stages, small annelids, free-swim- 

 ming mollusks, etc. After having carefully examined the contents of several 

 hundred hauls of the beam trawl with wing attachments during three or four 

 years, the writer can safely assert that the material brought up in the wings 

 is almost entirely additional to that obtained from the trawl net, and further- 

 more the contents of the wings reach the surface in far better condition than 

 the large specimens in the trawl net. In fact, they seldom appear to have 

 received any harder usage than the contents of a towing net skimming the sur- 

 face behind a sailboat or a rowboat. The trawl wings have already added 



