80 ARRANGEMENTS FOR WATER AND AERATION. 



disfigure it. This refinement of a windmill, moving readily under the 

 touch of a zephyr that the nerves of the old Hollandish structures never 

 would have recognized, supplies to the laboratory the pure water and 

 steady currents of air that preserve its vitality. The soft clucking of its 

 musical motion is rarely silent, for day after day the south-west summer 

 breeze comes lazily but steadily in, as though Newport by under the 

 track of a trade-wind. 



Out from the windmill, some twenty-five yards into the harbor chan- 

 nel, runs a pipe which is bent up vertically at the end, and capped with a 

 pair of T's, through the screened, hanging tips of which the clean sea- 

 water is sucked in, in such a way that no sea-weed can enter and clog the 

 pipe. Through this pipe the windmill will draw ten gallons a minute, at 

 a moderate speed, pumping it into a cistern in the attic of the laboratory 

 which holds about one thousand four hundred gallons. When this is full, 

 the overflow — for the mill goes on regardless of the demand — escapes 

 into an open sink down - stairs, so that the condition of the cistern is 

 always apparent. The water used in the laboratory, however, does not 

 come by direct flow from the bottom of the cistern, but is drawn through 

 a siphon. This secures the regular pressure, and avoids the variation of 

 "head" at different stages of water which would resnlt from the other 

 method. This water (as I have already mentioned) is all clean sea-water, 

 salt as the open ocean, and is incessantly renewed. 



The windmill also drives an air-pump, which forces the air into a 

 drum, whence it escapes to the laboratory under an equal and steady 

 pressure (secured by proper valves) of five pounds to the square inch. 

 These arrangements for a constant and uniform supply of water and 

 air under easy control are the foundation of the facilities here afforded 

 for the continued and successful study of living marine animals. 



There is a large cellar-basement, usefnl for dissection of great fishes 

 and general storage, and a third story having a suite of chambers charm- 

 ing for an artist's or other delicate work, for which a good light and the 

 encouragement of pleasant surroundings are needed; but the "labora- 

 tory " proper is a room perhaps forty-five feet long by twenty-five wide, 

 entered from the ground, witli which its floor is level on the uphill side 

 of the house. 



The southern side of this room is occupied wholly by glass shelving, 

 closets, etc. A part of the shelves hold the working library — not many 

 books, nor in fine bindings, but in all sorts of languages, full of strange 

 diagrammatic figures and Latin names, of anatomical descriptions and 

 tables of classification — unentertaining volumes to the layman, not at 



