174 SEA GRANT COLLEGES 



It seems appropriate that I and Secretary Dillon Ripley as suc- 

 cessor to former Smithsonian Institution Secretaries Joseph Henry 

 and Spencer F. Baird of 100 years ago, aa^ain record the Institution's 

 concern with the total environment and the necessity for greatl}^ ex- 

 panded studies of life in the sea. 



The proposed bill, S. 2439, is an important extension of our efforts 

 to learn about tlie sea. It offers a great opportunity to exploit this 

 70-percent of the earth which is still, in man}' ways, a mystery to us. 



The proposed act encourages the establishment of research centers 

 of excellence in existing institutions. Whereas the Hatch Act of 1887 

 was necessary to extend the Morrill Act of 1862 into scientific research 

 and experimentation, the proposed act hopefully will give due em- 

 phasis to basic research from the beginning. 



As an extension of this historical illustration, I would like to com- 

 pare the situation at the time of the passage of the Land Grant College 

 Act with that at the present time. In 1862 the United States was an 

 agricultural Nation. The vast majority of its citizens were engaged 

 in farming as a vocation. The passage of the Morrill Act had been 

 preceded 2 months earlier by the creation of a Department of Agri- 

 culture. Under these conditions it was highly appropriate and neces- 

 sary to place great emphasis on the improvement of practical farming 

 teclmiques and the dissemination of ideas through an extension system. 



By contrast, the seas today are almost as poorly known as was the 

 American Contment when the Pilgrims landed in 1620. We do not 

 have a major segment of our population ready to farm the sea. They 

 are not merely awaiting the dissemination of known information. 

 This proposed bill is in some ways more visionary in that regard than 

 its predecessor. 



The emphasis in sea grant colleges must be to obtain data of a basic 

 nature needed for the appropriate husbandly and management of our 

 marine resources. They must engage in such familiar agricultural 

 practices as the seeking of brood stocks and experiments on how to 

 improve them. At the same time they must approach with diligence 

 the problem of inventory of the available resources and evaluation of 

 their potentials. We know which varieties of cows should be hus- 

 banded for milk production and which for beef. We have no similar 

 information on the sea creatures. We do not even know the complete 

 life histories of one of our most important commercial fisheries, the 

 tunas. 



Hybrid vigor is recognized as a most useful factor when applied to 

 the production of com, chickens, beef, and other agricultural products. 

 Yet today we do not even possess a rudimentary knowledge of the 

 genetics of some of our most important species of fish. Only recently 

 have we succeeded in culturing artificially some of the most common 

 fish species. We will not be ready to move vigorously into the hus- 

 bandry of marine resources until the fundamental knowledge about 

 the classification, ecology, and genetic characteristics of the life forms 

 of the '-ieas is acquired. 



I hope that this bill will focus attention on the need for basic re- 

 search which must be carried out in order to achieve success in the 

 exploitation of marine resources. 



Additional activity stimulated by a bill along the lines as this 

 would assist the Smithsonian Institution in increasing its fundamental 

 investigations of many kinds of marine organisms of the sea by mak- 



