88 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
waters, some sixty fathoms deep (as far as the sun-light reaches, on the 
presence of which their power to build protoplasm depends) that it has 
been calculated that an acre of sea-water—surface measurement— 
furnishes as much nutritive vegetable matter as does an acre of rich 
meadow land in the course of a year. 
No one sailing over the Atlantic suspects the presence of such a 
rich vegetation, and indeed it can only be disclosed by filtering the water 
through an exceedingly fine fabric—the finest silk gauze used by millers 
is that generally employed for the purpose—and this is usually done by 
towing a net of such a fabric behind a boat so as to insure a definite 
amount of water passing through it. 
Investigations made in this way may be either qualitative—merety to 
determine the nature and relative numbers of the organisms so captured 
—or quantitative—to determine the absolute amount of the different 
kinds of organisms in a column of water of given dimensions. 
It is such quantitative investigations which have rendered the state- 
ments as to the richness of the marine vegetation possible, which are 
made in the foregoing paragraph. 
The tiny organisms obtained in this way are not all plants, many of 
them are animals, feeding on the former, and themselves serving as food - 
for larger creatures.” 
This floating surface life must on some parts of our Atlantic coast 
include, in numbers beyond all imagination, the floating larve of mol- 
lusks like the oyster and various species of clams. Dr. Whiteaves in his 
deep-sea dredging report in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 1873, gives the 
statement of the late Hon. W. H. Pope:—“ Oysters have flourished in 
every tidal river and bay in Prince Edward Island,” and even the reduced 
areas in that Province, in New Brunswick, and in Nova Scotia, still 
produce a crop of young whose numbers exceed the powers of man to 
comprehend. The propagation of the oyster justifiably claimed Pro- 
fessor Wright’s special attention at Malpeque, and various methods of 
oyster culture, the collection and retention of spat, the rearing of seed 
oysters under control, ete., were tried, while Dr. Stafford made some 
important additions to our knowledge of the ‘veliger’ of this valued 
shell-fish, including the discovery of an eye or visual organ, not described 
before by Brooks, Ryder, or any previous authority, though in the Mussel 
(Mytilus) an eye-spot occurs, as Dr. J. H. Wilson discovered at St. 
Andrews in Scotland. The experiments conducted in connection with 
the station, in which Captain Ernest Kemp with his Government 
steamer “ Ostrea” aided, will no doubt give some guidance to the 
Government in dealing with that esteemed mollusk, which is decreasing 
