MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 175 



scale is to be carried on at Port Erin, it will be necessary 

 to erect a separate building — the hatching house — with an 

 adjacent concreted pond and a boat jetty, alongside the 

 Biological Station. The hatchery house, made two storeys 

 high and placed in the gap to the west of our Aquarium, 

 so that the lower floor would open on the beach and the 

 upper floor from the Aquarium room, could be put up 

 for a comparatively small sum by our local builder at 

 Port Erin. The necessary concreted pond, to be used 

 sometimes for spawning fish and sometimes for rearing 

 young, could be readily made on the beach below, using 

 the cliff as one side, while the opposite wall of the pond 

 could be run out as a boat jetty. Such a hatchery would 

 be available both for sea-fish eggs and also for hatching 

 young lobsters, and its connection with the Biological 

 Station should be an advantage to both institutions, and 

 should especially conduce to the efficiency of the hatchery. 



" Plankton " Observations. 



From an early period in the L.M.B.C. work attention 

 has been directed to the importance of careful observations 

 on the periodic variations in the amount and nature of 

 the plankton or assemblage of drifting organisms on or 

 near the surface of the sea. 



In 1888, during our first year of work at Puffin Island, 

 we started our Curator of the Station taking weekly 

 gatherings of surface organisms, which were sent to 

 Liverpool and examined by Mr. Thompson. This was 

 kept up intermittently during the five years of our occu- 

 pation of the Puffin Island Station. During the first 

 year of the Committee's work (1885) we noticed (see 

 Report 1, p. 21, and Beport 3, p. 8) in some of the 

 gatherings the presence of those extraordinary numbers 

 of HalosjjJicvra, Tetraspom, and other minute gelatinous 



