1912] Ritter: The Marine Biological Station of San Diego — 213 
experimenting and observing, and laboratory experimenting and 
observing that is far-reaching, not only as to application but as 
to scientific conceptions in the largest sense. 
Much stress has recently been put upon the element of control 
in research. By some biologists this is held to be almost if not 
quite the end and aim of such research, because according to 
the view of these persons, control not only constitutes the essence 
of our understanding of living beings, but also because the 
highest level of utilitarian interest in organisms is reached in 
this way. There can be no doubt about the importance of 
control, and it stands forth in particularly large and bold out- 
line when seen from the vantage ground of research of such 
scope as that in marine biology, where it presents itself under 
two very distinet aspects. First in the field work there is the 
complex and exceedingly difficult matter of controlling, that is, 
restraining and determining, everything concerned in the in- 
vestigation except the organisms themselves. The object is to 
find what organisms there are in existence, exactly where they 
are, and what they are doing under the conditions imposed upon 
them by nature alone. Control over them is what is nof wanted 
even were such a thing possible, since knowledge of their mode 
of life in nature is exactly what is sought. By judicious and 
long-continued experimenting with the means of collecting and 
observing we find that very extensive information and under- 
standing can be obtained in this way. At the same time the 
farther we go on this track the more numerous and the more 
clearly defined become problems not to be reached by these 
means—problems whose solutions, so far as solutions are possible, 
must be reached through a shift from controlling the means of 
observation to controlling the objects of observation, i.e., the 
organisms themselves. Such control can generally be exercised 
far more effectively and advantageously in the laboratory than 
anywhere else. As illustrative of the binary method demanded 
for handling problems of marine biology, attention may be 
called to Esterly’s work on the vertical distribution of the 
copepod Eucalanus elongatus. So far the field results indicate 
an absence of a regular up-and-down migration of this species. 
Assuming these results to be correct, the question naturally 
