October 11, 1912] 



SCIENCE 



459 



his professional associates of his hopes, and 

 by means of fascinatingly written articles 

 he instructed and interested the educated 

 classes. He visited numberless people and 

 imbued them with the same inspiration by 

 means of his selfless enthusiasm, through 

 his knowledge of the world, his eloquence 

 of speech and power of repartee. Each 

 new patron gained served as the point of 

 approach to other connections, until he at 

 last reached the place where decisive steps 

 must be taken. With astonishing rapidity 

 he familiarized himself with conditions 

 previously foreign to his life. He was in- 

 exhaustible in thinking out new methods, 

 but restless as was the working of his 

 imagination and impulsive as was his char- 

 acter from childhood, he soon learned that 

 unremitting self-control which permitted 

 of no undue haste. He knew that situa- 

 tions change, he knew the mutability of 

 public opinion, what human decisions mean, 

 and that they none of them are unchange- 

 able. Patiently he was able to wait, but 

 like the eagle in the air, his eye was upon 

 the object of his desire, and he swooped 

 upon it as soon as it was attainable. And 

 all these traits were held together and 

 crowned by an unusual strength of mind, 

 which, to quote Jacob Burchhart, "alone is 

 able and therefore loves alone to sail 

 through storm." 



As you all know, the origin of the Zool- 

 ogical Station rests on two entirely original 

 ideas of Dohm 's ; one of which was to con- 

 nect with the laboratories a public aqua- 

 rium such as already existed in London, 

 Hamburg and Berlin. His idea was that 

 the income that these other aquaria were 

 paying to the stockholders in this institu- 

 tion should be used for the benefit of sci- 

 ence. Dohrn has said, and it has often 

 been repeated, that this idea came to him 

 on the fourth of January, 1870, as he rode 

 in the mail coach from Apolda to Jena. 



"It came to me," so he writes, "like a 

 revelation, and a limitless horizon of attain- 

 able results appeared to my feverishly 

 working fancy." This fundamental idea 

 demanded for its field of operation a large, 

 much-visited city on a seacoast rich in 

 fauna, and this determined the choice of 

 Naples. As it was later shown that the 

 admission to the aquarium would not suf- 

 fice for the cost of current expenses, Dohrn 

 fixed upon his second chief idea — to secure 

 for the station an enlarged and stable in- 

 come by renting out to governments and 

 corporations tables for work. And it was 

 chiefly this so-called "table" system which 

 gave an international character to the sta- 

 tion. The station is self-supporting, 

 and both ideas have proved to be successful. 

 The subsidies of the German and Italian 

 governments pay for "tables." Dohrn 

 realized, however, that in the beginning this 

 would not be practicable. First of all a 

 large capital had to be secured for the fur- 

 nishing of the building ; and this sum came 

 mainly from Dohrn 's father. In the ad- 

 dress made by Dohrn in the spring of 1897, 

 as the station was celebrating the twenty- 

 fifth anniversary of the laying of the cor- 

 nerstone, Dohrn spoke with loving expres- 

 sion of filial reverence, of all that he men- 

 tally and materially owed to his father; 

 but one must not think that his father's 

 help came to him without trouble or bat- 

 tling. No one was more firmly convinced 

 than this very father that his son was fol- 

 lowing a Utopian scheme, was chasing a 

 will-o'-the-wisp, sure to result in a pitiful 

 fiasco. He not only firmly refused every 

 appeal for aid, but a complete break which 

 lasted a long time between these equally 

 hard heads was the consequence. The quiet 

 soothing influence of Dohm's mother aided 

 much in the solution of these differences of 

 opinion. When the son had succeeded with- 

 out his father 's help, and the latter, against 



