MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 165 



eous observation and record of the organisms on the 

 surface at a number of stations in our district. 



It is these general problems, sometimes extending over 

 neighbouring sciences and requiring the co-operation of 

 several specialists, which are now of the greatest interest 

 and practical importance. Our specialists in marine 

 biology are becoming more minute in the details of their 

 work, but, at the same time, wider in their knowledge, in 

 their outlook, and in the applications of their research. 

 Biology— which has given not only to science but to all 

 departments of knowledge the educational method of 

 laboratory work and the great fundamental principle, 

 Evolution, which underlies all advance — is ever ready to 

 adopt methods and results from other sciences as an aid in 

 the investigation of her special problems on land and sea. 

 And in this age, pre-eminently that of Biology — the age 

 of Darwin, Pasteur, and Lister — it is coming to be recog- 

 nised equally over Europe and America that nowhere 

 more than in Marine Biological Stations has the work of 

 the great masters been followed up and extended, and 

 that nowhere else can be found a more natural and happy 

 union of the philosophy of science and of the industrial 

 applications. It is that that gives to marine laboratories 

 their first-rate importance both in pure science and in the 

 work of Sea-Fisheries Committees, and which is causing 

 universities all over the world to establish and maintain 

 Biological Stations as a necessary condition for the 

 advance of natural knowledge. Thus the University of 

 Paris has lioscoff and Banyuls, Vienna has Trieste, St. 

 Andrew's has just opened the Gatty Marine Laboratory, 

 and Glasgow the Millport Station. We have our modest 

 workshop at Port Erin, and our more extensive Fisheries 

 Institution at Piel, in Lancashire, but we may well hope 

 for and claim a larger and better equipped laboratory at 



