BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH a 
announcement of the 1897 session was therefore very late and the 
attendance suffered seriously in consequence of the rumor that 
had spread that the Laboratory would not be opened that year. 
A meeting of the board of trustees was held at Woods Hole 
on August 6, 1897, and at this meeting a majority of the members 
present, who were favorable to Whitman, voted to call a special 
meeting of the members of the Corporation to be held in Boston 
on August 16 for the purpose of considering changes in the by- 
laws. The purpose of the proposed changes was (1) to provide 
that the annual meeting of the Corporation should be held in 
Woods Hole instead of in Boston, and in August instead of Nov- 
ember, and to increase the quorum so as to secure a more repre- 
sentative attendance and avoid local control, and (2) to change 
the body of the trustees from a body practically self-perpetuating 
to an elective body, elected by the Corporation in four groups, one 
such group to be elected each year for a period of four years, and 
thus avoid the old practice of the simultaneous annual election 
of all members. 
At this meeting about eighty-seven members of the Corporation 
recorded their names with the clerk, and it was estimated that 
there were about twenty others present who did not do so. It 
was the largest and most representative meeting of the Corpora- 
tion ever held up to that time. The program as outlined was 
unanimously adopted. 
This amounted to no less than a revolution in the government 
of the Laboratory, and the action was promptly followed by the 
resignation of seven out of the nine members of the board of 
trustees resident in Boston and its vicinity. Six of these and one 
other trustee then drew up a statement which was primarily an 
attack on the Director, Professor Whitman, which they published 
in Science, October 8, 1897. To this statement a complete reply 
was made in the more dignified, but less permanent, form of a 
separate pamphlet by a committee of three of the trustees who 
stood by the Director (‘‘A Reply to the Statement of the Former 
Trustees of the Marine Biological Laboratory,” Boston, Alfred 
Mudge and Son, Printers, No. 24 Franklin Street, 1897.) This 
reply and the facts that two-thirds of the board of trustees stood 
