144 FOUNDERS OF OCEANOGRAPHY 



to think there were two young Englishmen — ^Francis Maitland 

 Balfour, the great Cambridge embryologist, and the gifted 

 Charles Grant, the author of Stories of Naples and the Camorra. 



Dohrn was a man of great determination and seK-reliance, 

 and when finally the official support he had expected to 

 receive from Germany failed him he had the courage of his 

 convictions and showed his faith in the project by devoting 

 his personal fortune to the estabhshment of the Stazione 

 Zoologica — the first part of which was opened in 1873, to be 

 followed by a second building in 1890, and a^third devoted to 

 physiology in 1907. The upper figure on Plate X gives a 

 characteristic representation of Dohrn in later life. 



In addition to being a man of ideas and initiative and a 

 great organizer and administrator, he was an eminent 

 zoologist and produced a large amount of ^first-rate original 

 research. The great work of his life was to prove that 

 Vertebrates were derived from Chaetopod worms, and that 

 their characteristic features were not newly acquired but were 

 modifications of other organs which had in the ancestral 

 worms some different function to perform. He regarded 

 Amphioxus and the Tunicata as degenerate back-sliders 

 which threw no light on the problem of early ancestry. 



I have a vivid recollection of an occurrence during my 

 first meeting with Dohrn which emphasizes the point. It was 

 about 1880, when he visited Edinburgh to see the " Chal- 

 lenger " collections, and, being at that time Demonstrator of 

 Zoology in the university, I was deputed by my chief, Sir 

 Wyville Thomson, who was then in poor health, to take his 

 distinguished visitor round the department and especially 

 to see the large lecture theatre in the museum. Dohrn, who 

 had been told by Thomson that I was working at the " Chal- 

 lenger " Tunicata, said he would Hke to try his voice from 

 the platform, and sending me up to the back benches of the 

 theatre, improved the occasion by hurling at me in stentorian 

 tones a few emphatic sentences on the degeneracy of Tuni- 

 cates, ending up with : " And so your Ascidia is a humbug ! " 



