68 INVESTIGATIONS IN EMBKYOLOGY. 



which the subjects for study are brought. This is greatly to their ad- 

 vantage (the hatching of fish-eggs may be checked, yet without loss of 

 vitality, and held back indefinitely, by steady cold), and it was because 

 of the opposite condition that sea-side students at Nahant and Salem 

 and Gloucester have always been less successful. English laboratories 

 have an equal difficulty, overcome only by the expensive use of ice. 



But to go into all the details of laboratory expedients employed here 

 is beyond space, and perhaps would interest very few. Everything is in- 

 tended for work and study, not for show; there is nothing in the way of 

 an "aquarium." If it happens that the apparatus or the zoolog'ical speci- 

 mens are pretty, that is a happy chance, not the first intention. No liv- 

 ing object is kept longer than there is use for it: mere curiosity must 

 make way for original investigation into something else more obscure. 



The studies at the laboratory have continued through half a dozen 

 summers, and have been conducted by Mr. Agassiz, the late Count L. F. 

 de Pourtales, Professor Walter Faxon, Dr. W. K. Brooks, and Mr. T. W. 

 Fewkes, with a few others at intervals. 



Mr. Agassiz's work here has been mainly on the embryology of fishes, 

 radiates, crustaeea, annelids, and pelagic tunicates. Several contributions 

 to the National Academ}' of Science and to the Proceedings of the Amer- 

 ican Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston) have grown out of them, 

 chiefly upon the young stages of flounders, goose-fish, and various other 

 genera; and embryological observations on the ctenophoric jelly-fishes; on 

 the gar-pike (Lepidosteus), and on Balanoglossus. Mr. Agassiz was also 

 employed for a long time in working up the sea-urchins brought home 

 by the Challenger deep-sea expedition, the results of- which have been 

 embodied in the special scientific reports of that famous cruise. 



Count Pourtales spent his energies chiefly on his favorite corals, For- 

 aminifera and their kin, publishing his results in the memoirs of the-Mu- 

 seuin of Comparative Zoology, where he was keeper. Mr. Faxon,' who is 

 assistant professor of zoology at Harvard, made a specialty of Crustacea, 

 and wrote several papers on their embryology. 



Dr. Brooks, who is now assistant professor of biology at Johns Hop- 

 kins University, and who carries on a marine laboratory of his own at 

 Beaufort, North Carolina, busied himself with the embryology of mol- 

 lusks, publishing one paper. Dr. Fewkes, now Mr. Agassiz's assistant 

 in the Zoological Museum at Cambridge, did the same thing with jelly- 

 fishes. Much of the work of these and other students (among them some 

 ladies) remains unpublished in note-books and manuscript (for "rushing 

 into print" is frowned upon by this cautious coterie), so that -future re- 



