1228 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES. 



Hence the futility of endeavoring, even on economic grounds, to restrict our 

 investigations to food fishes or other animals of obvious commercial importance. 

 What we discover from the study of a "minnow" is, in the great majority of 

 cases, quite as applicable to a mackerel or a cod. But the minnow is easier to 

 obtain and easier to manipulate. A few years ago an expert in the employ of the 

 Bureau of Fisheries investigated the hearing of fishes. His experiments were 

 concerned chiefly with a little fish of no seeming importance whatever. He 

 cut its nerves and, worse yet, played musical notes at the helpless creature! 

 Could anything seem less practical or less worthy of the attention of serious- 

 minded persons? Recently the fishermen of certain sections of our coast have 

 been stirred up by the alleged effects of naval target practice and of the noise 

 produced by motor boats in driving away fishes from their customary haunts. 

 To whom does the Bureau appeal to settle this problem? Naturally to the 

 man who knows most about the hearing of fishes. The matter is tested, and 

 the problem — or one phase of it, at least — is settled very briefly. The motor 

 boats are found to be innocuous — at any rate to the fishes. Regarding the 

 cannon, a decisive answer is likewise hoped for soon. But this is taking us a 

 long way from the biological survey of the Woods Hole region. 



Years ago Woods Hole was selected by Professor Baird as the most prom- 

 ising spot upon our coast for the commencement of a scientific study of fisheries 

 problems. From the very outset he gathered about him a staff of naturalists 

 of the type that was dominant in that generation — men eager to seek out every 

 living thing concealed beneath the waves, to describe and figure and name. 

 Accordingly, the first volume pubHshed by Baird as Commissioner of Fish and 

 Fisheries contains not only a catalogue of the fishes of the east coast of North 

 America, but an extended report upon the invertebrate animals of Vineyard 

 Sound and adjacent waters and a list of the marine algae found in this same 

 region. In spite of the previous labors of Desor and Adams and Gould and 

 Leidy and Stimpson and Perkins and the two Agassiz, who had already made 

 essays into the waters of southern New England, Verrill and Smith found in 

 Vineyard Sound and Buzzards Bay a practically virgin field. We begin to 

 reahze the pioneer nature of much of their work when we recall that even some 

 of our most abundant and famihar species — e. g., the sponge Chalina arbuscula, 

 the tube- worm Hydroides dianthus, the shrimp Virbius zoster kola, and the 

 beach flea Orchestia agilis — were first described in the Report upon the 

 Invertebrate Animals of Vineyard Sound. And, indeed, this report, hasty and 

 ill-digested as it was, remains to this time our chief single reference work upon 

 the fauna of this section of our coast. That first inclusive list of local species 

 has been much extended, it is true, partly by the original authors, partly by a 

 more recent group of naturalists, who have prepared for the Bureau of Fisheries 

 a series of monographic reports upon certain phyla or classes of animals. 



