BIOLOGICAL LABORATORY AT NAPLES 



the large colony of Neapolitan fishermen made it cer- 

 tain that skilled collectors would always be at hand to 

 make available the wealth of material. It requires no 

 technical education to appreciate the value of this to 

 the original investigator, particularly to the student of 

 life problems. A skilful worker may do much with a 

 single specimen, as, for example, Johannes Muller did 

 half a century ago with the one available specimen of 

 amphioxus, the lowest of vertebrates, then recently 

 discovered. What Muller learned from that one speci- 

 men seems almost miraculous. But what if he had had 

 a bucketful of the little boneless creatures at his dis- 

 posal, as the worker at Naples now may have any day 

 for the asking? 



When it comes to problems of development, of hered- 

 ity, a profusion of material is almost a necessity. But 

 here the creatures of the sea respond to the call with 

 amazing proficiency. Most of them are, of course, 

 oviparous, and it is quite the rule for them to deposit 

 their eggs by hundreds of thousands, by millions even. 

 Everybody knows, since Darwin taught us, that the 

 average number of offspring of any given species of 

 animal or plant bears an inverse proportion to the 

 liability of that species to juvenile fatalities. When, 

 therefore, we find a fish or a lobster or other pelagic 

 creature depositing innumerable eggs, we may feel per- 

 fectly sure that the vast majority of the eggs them- 

 selves, or the callow creatures that come out of them, 

 will furnish food for their neighbors at an early day. 

 It is an unkind world into which the resident of the 

 deep is born. But his adversity is his human contem- 

 porary's gain, and the biologist will hardly be blamed, 



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