A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



whose building he has entered. Even though he note 

 casually the inscription "Stazione Zoologica" above 

 the entrance, he may never suspect that the aquarium 

 he has just visited is only an adjunct the popular ex- 

 hibit, so to speak of the famous institution of tech- 

 nical science known to the English-speaking world as 

 the Marine Biological Laboratory at Naples. Yet such 

 is the fact. The aquarium seems worthy enough to 

 exist by and for itself. It is a great popular educator 

 as well as amuser, yet its importance is utterly insig- 

 nificant compared with the technical features of the 

 institution of which it is an adjunct. 



This technical department, the biological laboratory 

 proper, has its local habitation in the parts of the build- 

 ing not occupied by the aquarium parts of which the 

 general public, as a rule, sees nothing. There is, in- 

 deed, little to see that would greatly interest the casual 

 inspector, for in its outward aspects one laboratory is 

 much like another, a seeming hodgepodge of water- 

 tanks, glass jars of specimens, and tables for micro- 

 scopes. The real status of a laboratory is not de- 

 termined by the equipment. 



And yet it will not do to press this assertion too far, 

 for in one sense it is the equipment of the Naples lab- 

 oratory that has made it what it is. Not, however, 

 the equipment in the sense of microscopes and other 

 working paraphernalia. These, of course, are the best 

 of their kind, but machinery alone does not make a 

 great institution, any more than clothes make the 

 man. The all-essential and distinctive equipment of 

 the laboratory reveals itself in its personnel. In the 

 present case, as always in a truly great institution of 



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