PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 497 
physical sciente amongst the numerous members of the British Govern- 
ments of the last thirty-five years. It is not so very long ago—I am glad to 
say that one of the actors of my little story is still with us—that Sir Joseph 
Hooker, then Director of the Royal Gardens at Kew, was walking through 
the grounds with Mr. Ayrton, President of the Board of Works, which in 
those days was the Government Department responsible for Kew. They 
happened to run across Mr. Bentham, the great authority upon the classi- 
fication of plants. Sir Joseph introduced him to the President, adding, 
‘he works in our herbarium.’ ‘ Dear me,’ said the President, ‘I hope you 
don’t get your feet wet.’ Now I do not want for a moment to suggest that 
our present genial President of the Board of Works—whose official connec- 
tion with Kew has been long severed—would not readily distinguish between 
an herbarium and an aquarium, but what I do wish to emphasise is that this 
ignorance of some of the most elementary details of scientific method exists 
in many of our rulers and in many of our permanent officials—not in all by 
any means, I know of some most notable exceptions—but in many. It is 
but human to distrust what we cannot understand, and it is this lack of 
understanding which is largely retarding progress at the present day. 
iif, 
International Ocean Research. 
As an example of international co-operation in scientific research I may 
take the investigations which have been going on for the last seven years 
in the Baltic Sea, in the North Sea, and in that greater Norwegian Sea 
which stretches from the western coast of Norway north to Spitzbergen and 
westward beyond Iceland and the Faroes. In this inquiry no less than ten 
nations—in fact, all those whose shores touch these seas—have had a share 
—England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Germany, Den- 
mark, Holland, and Belgium—and since most of these countries have a 
special steamer equipped for research and under the command of men 
trained in scientific methods, it has been possible to collect a mass of facts 
connected with the seas of Northern Europe such as has never been got 
together before for any similar area of the ocean. 
The aim of those responsible for the scheme of work waS to obtain as 
complete a survey as possible of the physical and biological conditions of the 
seas in question. They wanted to know the direction of ocean currents, 
both superficial and along the bottom; the variations in the degree of 
salinity of the water in time and in space; the nature of the sea-bottom, 
and whether this could be correlated with the fauna, sessile or moving, 
found upon it, and whether this fauna reacted on the prevalence or absence 
of food-fishes; the influence of depth, salinity, and temperature on the 
fauna; the seasonal variations and fluctuations of the small floating 
organisms often called the plankton; the life-history of our food-fishes, 
where and when they deposited their ova; what became of the ova; the 
distribution of the larval stages ; the age at which the fish become mature, 
and their average length of life. 
Then, again, it was hoped that much could be learned about the influence 
of man’s activity on the sea. The relative depletion of the fish population 
caused by different modes of fishing ; the intensity of trawling ; how often 
does the trawl pass over the same ground in a given time? The question 
whether or no the seas are being over-fished, and, if so, what measures can 
be taken to lessen this evil, either by close time, limiting the size of fish 
captured, or by artificial fish-breeding. Many of these last-named problems 
concern the legislator as much as the man of science. The function of the 
latter is to provide facts upon which the administrator may act. 
Such a vast task as was set out by the International Council in 1902 
1909. : k K 
