BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY AT NAPLES 



As one recovers his senses and begins to take definite 

 note of things about him he sees that each one of the 

 many grottos has a different set of occupants, and that 

 not all of the creatures there are as unfamiliar as at 

 first they seemed. Many of the fishes, for example, 

 and the lobsters, crabs, and the like, are familiar 

 enough under other conditions, but even these old ac- 

 quaintances look strange under these changed cir- 

 cumstances. But for the rest there are multitudes of 

 forms that one had never seen or imagined, for the sea 

 hides a myriad of wonders which we who sail over its 

 surface, and at most glance dimly a few feet into its 

 depths, hardly dream of. Even though one has seen 

 these strange creatures "preserved" in museums, he 

 does not know them, for the alleged preservation 

 there has retained little enough of essential facies of 

 the real creature, which the dead shell can no more 

 than vaguely suggest. 



Here, however, we see the real thing. Each creat- 

 ure lives and moves in a habitat as nearly as may be 

 like that which it haunted when at liberty, save that 

 tribes that live at enmity with one another are here sep- 

 arated, so that the active struggle for existence, which 

 plays so large a part in the wild life of sea as well as 

 land, is not represented. For the rest the creatures 

 of the deep are at home in these artificial grottos, and 

 disport themselves as if they desired no other resi- 

 dence. For the most part they pay no heed whatever 

 to the human inspectors without their homelike prisons, 

 so one may watch their activities under the most favor- 

 able conditions. 



It is odd to notice how curiously sinuous are all the 



