THE MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATIONS OF EUROPE. 507 



little, fell iuto Hue and led to applications of the highest importance — 

 how the observation of the tarnishing of silver or the twitching leg of 

 the frog was the origin of photograph;^ or telegraphy— how the purely 

 abstract problem of spontaneous generation gave rise to the antiseptics 

 of surgery. 



As a preface to the present discussion the general number and loca- 

 tion of the European marine stations might conveniently be indicated 

 in the accompanying outline map. 



I. — FRANCE. 



The extended sea-coast has ever been of the greatest aid to the French 

 student. Along the entire northern coast the channel is not unlike our 

 Bay of Fundy in the way it sweeps the waters out at the lunar tides. 

 The rocks on the coast of Brittany, massive bowlders, swept and rounded 

 by swift running waters, will at these times become exposed to a depth 

 as great as 40 feet. This is the harvest time of the collector. He is 

 enabled to secure the animals of the deep with his own hand, to take 

 them carefully from the rocky crevices where they would ever have 

 avoided the collecting dredge. From earliest times this region has not 

 unreasonably been the field of the naturalist. It was here that Cuvier, 

 during the Reign of Terror, made his studies on marine invertebrates 

 which were to precede his Eegne Animal. The extreme westernmost 

 promontories of Brittany have, for the last half century, been the sum- 

 mer homes of de Quatrefages, Coste, Audouin, Milne- Edwards, and de 

 Lacaze-Duthiers. Coste created a laboratory at Concarneau, but this 

 has come to be devoted to practical fish culture, and is, at the present 

 day, of little scientific interest. It is owing to the exertions of Prof, 

 de Lacaze-Duthiers, of the Sorbonne, that the two governmental stations 

 of biology have since been founded. The first was established at lios- 

 coft', in one of the most attractive and favorable collecting regions in 

 Brittany, and has continued to grow in importance for the last twenty 

 years. As this station, however, could be serviceable during summer 

 only, it gave rise to a smaller dependency of the Sorbonne in the south- 

 ernmost part of France, on the Mediterranean, at Banyuls, which had 

 the additional advantage of a Mediterranean fauna. 



To these French stations should be added that of Prof Giard, at 

 Wimereux, near Boulogne, in the rich collecting funnel of the Straits 

 of Dover; that ot Prof. Sabatier, at Cette, not far from Banyuls, a 

 dependency of the University of JVIontpelier; that of Marseilles, and the 

 Russian station at Ville-Franche, near the Italian frontier. An interest- 

 ing station, in addition, is that at Arcachon, near Bordeaux, founded 

 by a local scientific society. Smaller stations are not wanting, as at the 

 Sables d'Olonne. 



At Roscoff the laboratory building looks directlj^ out upon the chan- 

 nel. (PI. XXVI.) In its main room, on the ground floor, work places are 

 partitioned off" for a dozen investigators; this on the one hand leads to 



