October 25, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



543 



quring the purification of waste before it 

 enters the stream. The general trend of 

 modern legislation is towai'ds the latter 

 course, no doubt due largely to the influ- 

 ence of the increasing number of State 

 Boards of Health; but why not make it a 

 question of municipal economy? 



If Newark, for example, wants her water 

 supply from the Passaic river, whose waters 

 are polluted, does it not seem absurd, speak- 

 ing broadly, that she should be required to 

 purify her supply of twenty million gal- 

 lons a day when the pollution comes, per- 

 haps, from one mill discharging only one 

 million gallons ? If one woolen mill on a 

 stream causes pollution that obliges a 

 dozen cities further down the stream to 

 construct filtration works, provided they 

 are to drink the water with any degree of 

 safety, would it not be more economical to 

 oblige the one mill to purify its compara- 

 tively small amount of waste before it is 

 allowed to enter the stream, instead of per- 

 mitting the pollution of the whole river? 

 Vice versa, streams already devoted to the 

 service of mills and manufacturies may 

 better serve the general economy by con- 

 tinuing in that service ; and the one or two 

 cities can build filtration plants at less 

 cost than that of purifying the wastes 

 of all the manufactories. Only a careful 

 study of the condition of the communities 

 along the banks can ascertain in which 

 way the gain to the whole people is found, 

 in which way public economy is best main- 

 tained. Henry N". Ogden. 



COENELL UNIVEESITY. 



MARINE LABOEATOBY OF THE UNITED 



STATES FISH COMMISSION AT WOOD'S 



HOLE STATION, SUMMER 



SEASON OF 1895* 



The present 'Laboratory of Scientific Re- 

 search ' was constructed after Professor 



*This has been an especially active season at the 

 Government and Marine Biological Laboratories at 

 "Wood's Hole. At our request Professor Peck, who 



Baird's designs in the year 1884, as part of 

 the large building which serves the depart- 

 ment of fish culture. This is, therefore, the 

 eleventh season during which scientific re- 

 search has been prosecuted under these con- 

 ditions both by government patronage and 

 by individual responsibility, and it is in- 

 structive to look back over these years and 

 see how many well-known workers have 

 been accommodated here, and of how much 

 service these advantages have been to 

 the learned institutions which they rep- 

 resent, such as Yale, Princeton, Harvard, 

 Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and the Univer- 

 sity of Pennsylvania, besides a large num- 

 ber of sma.ller colleges both East and West. 



There have been present at the Labora- 

 tory this summer thirty workers, represent- 

 ing twentj' important educational institu- 

 tions of this country, and one German uni- 

 versity; four of these institutions are vari- 

 ous high schools of the city of Chicago. 

 These thirty have been engaged upon such 

 a wide range of problems that only the 

 more notable can be mentioned. 



One piece of research, by Prof. H. V. 

 Wilson, upon the sjjonges from the Gulf of 

 California and the Galapagos Islands, col- 

 lected by the U. S. steamer Albatross, under 

 the direction of Professor Alexander Agas- 

 siz, has drawn our attention to the value 

 of that side of biological work. Embry- 

 ology naturally fills a large jjlace here and 

 two phases of it have been followed. The 

 first, by Prof. W. Patten, deals with ab- 

 normal development in Limulus embryos. 

 A certain small proportion of the eggs 

 pass through the normal formation of 

 the perfect embryo, only to then reverse 

 the process and fade back to the original 

 simple egg condition ; or a double embryo 

 may be formed, or a triple embryo in regu- 

 lar sequence, or one side of the embryo 



has been in charge of the research work at the Gov- 

 ernment station this summer, sends to Science this 

 informal report. 



