262 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1932 



great need at present is for observations especially planned to bring 

 out particular points rather than for stations scattered over wide 

 areas. The crying need is for proof. 



Now it may seem to the reader that oceanic circulation is a rela- 

 tively unimportant scientific problem. It is true that for the pur- 

 poses of navigation we now have sufficient knowledge of the main 

 currents and that for such services as the ice patrol the existing 

 methods give good results as applied to small areas. The reason 

 why we have here stressed circulation is that almost every prob- 

 lem in deep-sea oceanography is somehow linked to it. The marine 

 biologist can not adequately account for the distribution of life in 

 the sea without a good knowledge of the water movements. The 

 quantity of life in the sea is also linked to the current system since 

 it depends on the supply of certain chemicals in the water. These 

 essential chemicals are found in greatest abundance near the shore 

 because they are brought to the sea by the rivers. Wlien in a given 

 area they are used up more quickly than the currents can carry them 

 out from the shore, the population will die out. The sea is the origi- 

 nal home of life as we know it on earth. For countless ages the 

 evolution of marine forms must have been greatly influenced by 

 the supply of these vital chemicals. If it were not for the circula- 

 tion of the oceans, no matter how slow, large areas of it would be 

 completely barren. The important part which the ocean currents 

 are now playing (and have played in the past) in the climate of 

 the world is more generally appreciated. 



Anyone who has had experience in research work knows only too 

 well how one thing leads to another. An investigator no sooner 

 gets started on a problem than he finds that he can not progress until 

 he has settled another problem, which only develops after he has 

 begun work on the first. In oceanography the difficulty is increased 

 by the fact that such vast distances have to be covered and it is usu- 

 ally impossible to repeat the work. It almost seems that it requires 

 the experience of a preliminary cruise to know how to attack any 

 given problem. For this reason anyone planning a program for 

 scientific work at sea would do well not to attempt too much on one 

 cruise. There is little hope of finding an important problem that 

 can be settled by one expedition. Often it is the development of a 

 technique for handling new apparatus which is the main result of an 

 elaborately planned cruise. There is a vast supply of oceanographic 

 problems, but little is known about methods for settling them. 



With the formation of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institu- 

 tion and the building of the Atlantis those interested realized only 

 too well the difficulties of laying out a program. No longer was it 

 a question of planning for an isolated expedition which must yield 



