584 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE VIENNA INSTITUTION FOR EXPERIMENTAL 



BIOLOGY^ 



By Pkofessoe CHARLES LINCOLN EDWARDS 



COINCIDENT with the founding of our own government, the Em- 

 peror Joseph II,, of Austria, opened to the public the Prater, 

 the largest park in Vienna. At the entrance is the Prater-Stern, a 

 street-car center directly accessible from all parts of the inner city and 

 the outer districts by means of the city railway and many lines of elec- 

 tric cars. Here the people flock, especially on Sundays and holidays, to 

 that part known as the Volks-Prater, which is a veritable Austrian 

 Coney Island, with music, theaters, a giant wheel, circus, race-tracks, 

 exhibits of natives from various lands and the attractive sights of 

 " Venice in Vienna." On Easter Monday and May Day the largest and 

 gayest throngs seek the Prater, where they visit the many forms of 

 amusement, or walk and drive for miles through the park. Under the 

 four rows of chestnut trees in the Haupt-allee the fashionable aristo- 

 crats parade in their fine equipages drawn by beautiful horses and bear- 

 ing liveried coachmen and footmen. 



The International Exhibition of 1873, located in the Prater, had an 

 imposing aquarium constructed after plans by Brehm. More recently 

 this structure has been used by the Zoological Society of Vienna as a 

 vivarium for the display of the smaller animals. In consequence of the 

 existence of an older zoological garden, the royal menagerie at Schon- 

 brunn, it has not been possible to maintain this similar enterprise in 

 Vienna. Following a suggestion of Professor Hatschek, Dr. Hans 

 Przibram obtained the vivarium building from the zoological society 

 in 1902 and joined with the botanists. Dr. Wilhelm Figdor and Leopold 

 V. Portheim, in the establishment of an institution exclusively for sci- 

 entific research which has already become renowned. The field is not 

 limited, but offers an opportunity for the investigation of any biological 

 problem, chiefly by means of experimentation, upon either plants or 

 animals of the sea or the fresh waters, of the air, or the land, or dwell- 

 ing in caves or burrows beneath the surface of the soil. The grounds, 

 forming the garden around the vivarium building, were rented from the 

 government for fifteen years. The main building (Fig. 1) had to be 

 completely reconstructed and was then supplemented by two glass 



* For his courtesy in lending me the photographs here reproduced and for 

 his paper entitled "Die biologische Versuchsanstalt in Wien, " Zeitschrift f. 

 biol. Technik u. Methodik, 1910, I am especially indebted to Dr. Hans Przibram. 



