[PRINCE] BIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF CANADIAN WATERS 87 
The Station’s Nine Years’ Work. 
During the first two seasons at St. Andrews, N.B., Professors 
Knight (Queen’s), A. B. Macallum (Toronto), James Fowler 
(Queen’s), E. W. MacBride (McGill), Dr. R. R. Bensley (Toronto), De. 
B. Arthur Bensley (Toronto), Dr. Joseph Stafford (McGill), Dr. F. 8. 
Jackson (McGill), Dr. F. H. Scott (Toronto), Professor Bailey 
(Fredericton), Miss Ganong (St. Stephen), Dr. A. H. Mackay 
(Dalhousie), and myself, attended the laboratory and, in some cases, 
carried on extended investigations. 
A couple of seasons has been spent at each place and the locations 
chosen have been as follows: — 
1899-1900 St. Andrews, New Brunswick. 
1901-1902 Canso, Nova Scotia. 
1903-1904 Malpeque, Prince Edward Island. 
1905-1906 Gaspé, Quebec. 
A great variety of investigations has been carried on, some of these 
being of prime economic and practical importance. The station has kept 
prominently, before it, in all its work, the benefit of the fisheries, while 
carrying on in a thoroughly accurate and scientific way its seasonal 
investigations. Professor Ramsay Wright's laborious studies of the 
minute floating life in Atlantic waters off Canso, which are on the eve 
of publication, are, one may declare, fundamental. If I may be allowed 
to quote from the paper, not yet issued, I should lay stress upon these 
minute microscopic researches, and say, in Professor Wright’s own 
words :— 
“On land the vegetable kingdom everywhere seems to be pre- 
dominant, and to account amply for all the animal life which feeds on 
it directly or indirectly. But in the ocean, the obvious plants—the sea- 
weeds, brown, green and red—form a mere inconspicuous fringe of 
vegetation along the shore, and do not extend out beyond a few fathoms 
in depth. Such a fringe of vegetation can practically be neglected as 
the basic food-supply of the animal life of the ocean, and the question 
comes to be, ‘Whence do marine animals derive their fundamental 
supply of nourishment?’ Living creatures are either builders or 
destroyers of protoplasm, or in familiar parlance, either plants or 
animals, and the former are necessary to sustain the life of the latter. 
In what form then do these necessary protoplasm builders exist in the 
sea and other great bodies of water? 
The answer is, in the form of miscroscopic plants, often quite in- 
visible to the naked eye and yet present in such enormous numbers, not 
only at the surface but through the whole of the superficial layers of 
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