500 FRESH-WATER BIOLOGICAL STATIONS OF THE WORLD. 



This diversion of attention from the study of fresh-water life was 

 undoubtedly aided by the fact that fifty years ago all centers of educa- 

 tion 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 aesthetic sensibility as nothing did that he 

 saw about him. The concentration 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 

 through 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 investigation 

 which should afford him a better chance than already overcrowded ter- 

 ritory, have led again to the investigation of fresh-water life. So it 

 was that Fritsch, in Bohemia, 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 existence and offered a new and enticing 

 field for investigation. 



It was also in the same year, 1871, that Stimpson, one of the enthu- 

 siastic members of the old Chicago Academy of Sciences, conducted 

 some dredging expeditions in the deep water of Lake Michigan, 

 while about the same time Hoy, Milner, and Forbes entered upon 

 investigations at other points on these same lakes. The Chicago Acad- 

 emy and its collections, together with valuable manuscripts of Stimpson, 

 were destroyed in the great fire. The United States Fish Commission, 

 under whose auspices the work of Hoy and Milner was inaugurated, did 

 not pursue further the investigations of the lakes, and for years Forbes 

 was the only investigator 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 enormous 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 desultory. There were few 

 workers who were content to confine themselves to a single locality, or 



