1912] Ritter: The Marine Biological Station of San Diego 215 
because a danger more pervasive and subtle. There can be no 
question that laboratory biology may have much the stamp of 
museum anthropology, of library sociology, of scholastic phil- 
osophy, and of cloister theology. We must undoubtedly take 
many, probably most biological problems, into our laboratories 
for study. But the idea of learning biology proper in a labora- 
tory or a museum is as preposterous as the idea of learning 
navigation from a toy ship on a mill pond. Valuable as may 
be the ‘‘selected types’’ method of elementary instruction in 
biology when used with discretion, its possibility for evil when 
allowed to gain a full mastery over independent thinking is 
enormous. Recognition of the direful tendencies of the method 
was forced upon me some years ago by reading in an exhortatory 
tract written by an enthusiastic teacher for his classes in zoology 
this well-turned, assuring epigram: ‘‘When you have dissected 
a fish you have dissected the whole animal kingdom.’’ The 
mischievousness of such teaching would, I suppose, be admitted 
by most biologists to-day so far as concerns gross structure. 
The real magnitude of the evil is appreciated only when one 
sees clearly that the epigram would almost certainly be just as 
false if made with reference to minute structure, to physiological 
or psychological activity, or to chemical composition. The living 
world is illimitably vast, complex, and changing, and cannot be 
forced into a few ossifie formulations by all methods of work 
combined, much less by some one or a few methods. 
From what has been said, experimentation, particularly 
laboratory experimentation, would seem to play a part supple- 
mentary to observation-in-nature in only the restricted sense of 
assisting observation toward the solution of problems raised by 
the latter and found to be unmanageable by it. In addition to 
this important role experiment has another more independent 
and still higher, namely that of discovering attributes of organ- 
isms that could not have been suspected to belong to them by 
Inspecting the organisms in their natural environment alone: or 
otherwise expressed, attributes that could be revealed only by 
bringing the organisms into relations and conditions to which 
they have never before been subject. For example, the fact that 
an animal has the attribute of behaving in a particular manner 
