A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



drawn-out forms of clustered ascidians and the like, 

 the delicacy of manipulation required to make suc- 

 cessful preservations raises the method as practised 

 at Naples almost to the level of a fine art. It is a boon 

 to naturalists everywhere that the institution here is 

 able sometimes to supply other laboratories less favor- 

 ably situated with duplicates from its wealth of beau- 

 tifully preserved specimens. 



METHODS AND RESULTS 



These, then, are some of the material conditions that 

 have contributed to make the results of the scientific 

 investigations at the Naples laboratory notable. But 

 of course, even with a superabundance of material, dis- 

 coveries do not make themselves. "Who uses this 

 material ?" is, after all, the vital question. And in this 

 regard the laboratory at Naples presents, for any one 

 who gets at its heart, so to speak, an ensemble that is 

 distinctive enough ; for the men who work in the light 

 and airy rooms of the laboratory proper have come for 

 the purpose from all corners of the civilized globe, and 

 not a few of them are men of the highest distinction 

 in their various lines of biological science. A large pro- 

 portion are professors in colleges and universities of 

 their various countries ; and for the rest there is scarcely 

 one who is not in some sense master of the biological 

 craft. For it must be understood that this laboratory 

 at Naples is not intended as a training-school for the 

 apprentice. It offers in the widest sense a university 

 course in biology, and that alone. There is no in- 

 structor here who shows the new-comer how to use the 

 microscope, how to utilize the material, how to go 



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