A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



school-boys. The stock language is probably Ger- 

 man, for this bohemian gathering is essentially a Ger- 

 man institution; but the Germans are polyglots, and 

 you will hardly find yourself lost in their company, 

 whatever your native tongue. 



Your companions will tell you that for years the 

 laboratory fraternity have met twice a week at this 

 homely but hospitable establishment. The host, hon- 

 est Dominico Vincenzo Bifulco, will gladly corroborate 

 the statement by bringing out for inspection a great 

 blank-book in which successive companies of his guests 

 from the laboratory have scrawled their names, written 

 epigrams, or made clever sketches. That book will 

 some day be treasured in the library of a bibliophile, 

 but that will not be until Bifulco is dead, for while he 

 lives he will never part with it. 



One comes to look upon this bohemian wine-shop as 

 an adjunct of the laboratory, and to feel that the free- 

 and-easy meetings there are in their way as important 

 for the progress of science as the private seances of the 

 individual workers in the laboratory itself. Not be- 

 cause scientific topics are discussed here, though doubt- 

 less that sometimes happens, but because of that vi- 

 talizing influence of the contact of kindred spirits of 

 which I am speaking, and because this is the one place 

 where a considerable number of the workers at the 

 laboratory meet together with regularity. 



The men who enter into such associations go out 

 from them revitalized, full of the spirit of propaganda. 

 Returned to their own homes, they agitate the ques- 

 tion of organizing marine laboratories there; and it is 

 largely through the efforts of the graduates, so to say, 



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