MARINE BIOLOGFOAL ASSOCIATION. 19 



it is subsidized to the extent of £1500 a year by the 

 Grermau Government^ its workers and much of the rest of 

 its income^ which in all amounts to about £5000 a year, 

 come from all parts of the world. The University of Cam- 

 bridge maintains a table for one of its students, as does also 

 the British Association. America has always one or two 

 investigators working under Dr. Dohrn, while various 

 European countries have their representatives. Not only 

 has the Naples station its tanks and its laboratories, but it 

 maintains steam launches and boats of various kinds, 

 diving apparatus for investigating the sea bottom, dredges 

 and trawlers, sailors and fishermen trained as collectors, 

 and issues regularly a series of handsome ^ Transactions,' 

 comparable to the publications of our " Challenger" expe- 

 dition. The advances made in the special department of 

 biology connected with fishes since the establishment of the 

 Naples' station has been immense, and has had besides 

 important bearings on other departments of the same 

 branch of science. In this country no regular station of 

 the kind has existed until within the last few months, 

 when, under the auspices of the Scottish Meteorological 

 Society, one has been established in an old quarry at 

 Grranton on the Firth of Forth, near Edinburgh. Already 

 the naturalists at Granton have done good work in investi- 

 gating the habits of the economical fishes, and especially 

 the herring, and some of the results of their work were 

 described to the Eoyal Society last Thursday by Professor 

 Cossar Ewart, of Edinburgh. For several years the British 

 Association has had a committee to superintend the work- 

 ing of a Scottish zoological station ; but the station has 

 been peripatetic and temporary, maintained only during 

 the summer months at different parts of the Scottish coast ; 

 nevertheless it has done excellent work. British naturalists 

 have been long convinced that both from a scientific and 

 economical point of view it is high time that a permanent 

 station on the model of that of Naples were established at 

 some suitable point on the coast of England. The success 

 of the recent Fisheries Exhibition has encouraged this 

 prevalent feeling, and has led our leading scientific men to 



