PREFACE A XV 



a year-round laboratory as well, with some outstanding researchers choos- 

 ing to pursue their life's work here. One recent wintry day, someone put 

 warm woolen hats on artist Elaine Pear Cohen's fine sculpture of scientists 

 talking, which represents the MBL spirit and resides at a major corner in 

 town. It evidently appeared that the scientists needed additional warming 

 resources to continue through winter. 



At first the MBL was just a summer operation. It began in 1888 as part 

 of America's response to the general move toward research at the seashore. 

 Little was known of marine life before 1800, but that began to change from 

 two directions. The laying of transoceanic telegraph cable brought many 

 questions about marine life. Common opinion had held that the pressure of 

 water would prevent any life from existing at very great depths in the seas. 

 People expected to find neat layers of different sorts of living beings, below 

 which would lie a layer of skeletons from those human bodies lost and 

 buried at sea, and below that perhaps a layer of gold coins, and anchors, and 

 other items lost overboard. Yet when the deep sea cables broke and were 

 hauled up for repair, they had numerous living organisms securely at- 

 tached. Life forms must be able to live down there after all, and the drive 

 quickly developed to explore those depths and to discover those living 

 organisms "where no man had gone before." Perhaps the sea even held 

 very simple and primitive organisms that would help to illuminate the 

 perfection of nature's design, thought researchers in the middle of the 

 nineteenth century, before Darwin. 



In the late nineteenth century, after Darvvdn had put forth his evolution 

 theory and after German biologist Ernst Haeckel had convinced so many 

 people that the right way to pursue biological science was to trace the 

 evolutionary relationships of organisms, biologists moved to the seashore. 

 Haeckel believed that all of life arose from very simple primitive organisms 

 resembling single cells. The question was, which organisms appeared first 

 and which later, and through what series of changes? The key, Haeckel 

 convinced a number of researchers, lay in marine organisms. Sea life, he 

 believed, was more primitive and therefore more basic in evolutionary 

 history. Studying the similarities and differences, especially of early embry- 

 onic development of a range of marine organisms, became the accepted 

 practice in biology. Besides, knowing the phylogenetic history, as it was 

 called, would reveal the ancestors of the vertebrates and of man. This, after 

 all, is something we care about. So to the seashore they went. 



Those few hardy pioneers therefore moved to the seashore to inves 

 figate the structure and function of the various peculiar aquatic species. 

 They asked: what lived in the water, and how did those forms relate to 

 terrestrial organisms? What could marine life reveal about the marvelous 

 diversity and distribution of life? The European approach to the sea cen- 

 tered on facilitating research into just such questions. In contrast to the 



