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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IX. No. 223. 



shadowed the life that had hitherto been 

 found in pond or ditch. It is, in my opinion, 

 also no small factor that many of the ma- 

 rine forms which were brought to the at- 

 tention of scientists were dazzling in their 

 beauty of form and in the brilliancy of 

 their coloring. The quieter, more unas- 

 suming forms of lacustrine life in temperate 

 regions could make no corresponding im- 

 press on the minds of the observers. So 

 the scientific world went to the sea-shore 

 for study and everywhere along the coast 

 of Europe, and even in the islands of the 

 Tropics were to be found the vacation re- 

 sorts of scientists. 



This diversion of attention from the 

 study of fresh-water life was undoubtedly 

 aided by the fact that fifty years ago all 

 centers of education and investigation 

 were comparatively close to the ocean, and 

 so it was easy for the scientist to reach the 

 point, where, as he had learned from the 

 reports of others, life was most abundant 

 and varied, and at the same time, appealed 

 to his testhetic sensibility as nothing did 

 that he saw about him. The concentra- 

 tion of interest on the life of the sea led to 

 the foundation of marine stations, among 

 which that at Naples was the first ,in point 

 of time, as it always has been and is to- 

 day, first in point of strength. But the 

 development of educational institutions 

 throvigh the large continental areas and 

 the limitations which their location imposed 

 upon investigators connected with these 

 institutions, together with the natural 

 efforts of man to find a field for investiga- 

 tion which should afford him a better 

 chance than already overcrowded territory, 

 have led again to the investigation of fresh- 

 water life. So it was that Fritsch, in Bo- 

 hemia, entered upon lacustrine investigation 

 as early as 1871, while about the same time 

 Forel, in Switzerland, was carrying on those 

 studies published between 1874 and 1879 

 in a series of papers on the ' Fauna of the 



Swiss Lakes ' culminating in the crowned 

 memoir of the Academy of Sciences on the 

 ' Abyssal Fauna of the Swiss Lakes,' that 

 brought to the knowledge of the scientific 

 world a hitherto unsuspected type of exist- 

 ence and offered a new and enticing field 

 for investigation. 



It was also in the same year, 1871, that 

 Stimpson, one of the enthusiastic members 

 of the old Ciiicago Academy of Sciences, 

 conducted some dredging expeditions in the 

 deep water of Lake Michigan, while about 

 the same time Hoy, Milner and Forbes en- 

 tered upon investigations at other points 

 on these same lakes. The Chicago Academy 

 and its collections, together with valuable 

 manuscripts of Stimpson, were destroyed 

 in the great fire, the V. S. Fish Commis- 

 sion, under whose auspices the work of Hoy 

 and Milner was inaugurated, did not pur- 

 sue further the investigations on the lakes, 

 and for years Forbes was the only investi- 

 gator who occupied himself in this country 

 with the study of lacustrine life. To his 

 work and influence we owe beyond a doubt 

 in our own country the awakened interest 

 in limnobiology, and under his direction 

 also was established the first general fresh- 

 water biological station on this continent, 

 of which more in another connection. 



The impulse toward the investigation of 

 fresh-water life which was inaugurated by 

 these men, gradually attracted to itself 

 workers, slowly at first, but approximately 

 a decade ago, with a sudden start the ranks 

 of such were rapidly filled up. An enor- 

 mous number of ponds and lakes, large 

 and small, scattered over the surface of the 

 continents, afforded an almost unlimited 

 field for investigation, and many early 

 studies were, to say the least, decidedly de- 

 sultory. There were few workers who were 

 content to confine themselves to a single 

 locality, or to a well-defined problem. A 

 scanty collection was made to serve as the 

 basis of a faunal list supposed to charac- 



