512 FRESH- WATER BIOLOGICAL STATIONS OF THE WORLD. 



fixed and of the movable stations. But these are, after all, minor dif- 

 ferences. All stations, whether fixed or movable, have really three 

 objects — teaching, investigating, experimenting — objects which may be 

 subserved directly or indirectly, or in both ways, by each one of them. 

 It is unquestionably true that the tendency within recent years has 

 been to make the university-trained scientist a laboratory man, unac- 

 quainted with work out of doors and among living things. This has 

 reacted unfavorably upon his teaching powers, and thus indirectly upon 

 the entire school system. Not that subjects in natural history are not 

 better taught in our secondary schools than they were twenty years 

 ago, when, in truth, they were hardly taught at all, but that the 

 naturalist to day is not trained as an outdoor observer and is little 

 capable of handling himself and his work in a new environment. As 

 Forbes says, "It is, in fact, the biological station, wisely and liberally 

 managed, which is to restore to us what is best in the naturalist of the 

 old school united to what is best in the laboratory student of the new.'.' 

 Thus, both through the influence of the investigators in the case of 

 those stations which do not carry on directly any educational work 

 and through the teaching of those which do conduct summer instruc- 

 tional courses, new life will be instilled into the teaching of natural 

 history throughout our country. 



In the second place, the fresh-water station is a center of investiga- 

 tion with all its stimulating effects on the individual thus brought in 

 contact with problems of nature and efforts for their solution, and in 

 the contributions to the advancement of knowledge which are the fruits 

 of a careful work on the part of its attaches. All that has been said 

 of the advantages of marine stations applies equally well to fresh- 

 water laboratories, together with the added advantages that their 

 accessibility brings these advantages to considerable regions which 

 would otherwise be entirely without them by virtue of their distance 

 from the sea. It is unnecessary that I should emphasize further this 

 phase of the question or dwell upon the greater simplicity of biological 

 conditions in fresh water over those which exist in the ocean. These 

 factors have been forcibly presented by many writers. 



Finally, the fresh-water station should be above all things an exper- 

 imental one, and in this direction the most valuable results are to be 

 looked for, both from the general scientific and from the technical 

 standpoint. To the scientist, this needs no demonstration; but it is 

 essential that the importance of such work, especially for fish culture, 

 be more widely understood. The advance in agricultural methods in 

 the United States is unquestionably due in large part to the develop- 

 ment of a splendid series of agricultural experiment stations in which 

 agricultural problems have been subjected to intensive experimenta- 

 tion. Contrasted with this, conditions in fish culture present almost 

 the opposite extreme. Fish eggs have been hatched in enormous num- 

 bers, but what is known of their subsequent history or what has been 



