214 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



waters, will at these times become exposed to a depth as great 

 as forty feet. This is the harvest-time of the collector; he is 

 enabled to secure the animals of the deep with his own hand, 

 to take them carefully from the rocky cfevices where they would 

 ever have avoided the collecting dredge. From earliest times 

 this region has not unreasonably been the field of the naturalist. 

 It was here that Cuvier, during the Reign of Terror, made 

 his studies on marine invertebrates which were to precede 

 his R^gnc Animal. The extreme westernmost promontories of 

 Brittany have, for the last half-century, been the summer 

 homes of de Quatrefages, Coste, Audouin, Milne-Edwards and 

 de Lacaze-Duthiers. Coste created a laboratory at Concarneau, 

 but this has come to be devoted to practical fish culture, and 

 is, at the present day, of little scientific interest. It is owing 

 to the exertions of Professor de Lacaze-Duthiers of the 

 Sorbonne, that the two governmental stations of biology have 

 since been founded. The first was established at Roscoff, in 

 one of the most attractive and favorable collecting regions in 

 Brittany, and has continued to grow in importance for the last 

 twenty years. As this station, however, could be serviceable 

 during summer only, it gave rise to a smaller dependency of 

 the Sorbonne in the southernmost part of France, on the 

 Mediterranean, at Banyuls, which had the additional advantage 

 of a Mediterranean fauna. 



To these French stations should be added that of Professor 

 Giard, at Wimereux near Boulogne, in the rich collecting 

 funnel of the Straits of Dover; that of Professor Sabatier at 

 Cette, not far from Banyuls, a dependency of the University of 

 Montpelier; that of Marseilles, and the Russian station at Ville- 

 Franche, near the Italian frontier. An interesting station in 

 addition, is that at Arcachon near Bordeaux, founded by a local 

 scientific society. Smaller stations are not wanting, as at the 

 Sables d'Olonne. 



At Roscoff the laboratory building looks directly out upon 

 the channel. In its main room on the ground floor, work 

 places are partitioned off for a dozen investigators; this on the 

 one hand leads to a large glass-walled aquarium room, seen in 

 the accompanying figure, while on the other opens directly to 



