OCEANOGRAPHY, BIONOMICS, AND AQUICULTURE. 449 



have had both the red and the yellow forms of Sarcodietyon catenata, 

 dredged from 30 to 40 fathoms, in a healthy condition with the polypes 

 freely expanded for an indefinite period; and Mr. Arnold Watson has 

 kept the Polynoid worm, Panthalis oerstedi, from the deep mud at over 

 50 fathoms, alive, healthy, and building its tube under observation, 

 first for a week at the Port Erin Station, and for many months at Shef- 

 field, in a comparatively small tank with no depth of water. Conse- 

 quently, it seems clear that with ordinary care almost any marine 

 animals from such depths as are found within the British area may be 

 kept under observation and submitted to experiment in healthy and 

 fairly natural conditions. The biological station, with its tanks, is in 

 fact an arrangement whereby we bring a portion of the sea with its rocks 

 and bottom deposits and seaweeds, with its inhabitants and their asso- 

 ciates, their food and their enemies, and place it for continuous study 

 on our laboratory table. It enables us to carry on the bionomical 

 investigations to which we look for information as to the methods and 

 progress of evolution; in it lie centered our hopes of a comparative 

 physiology of the invertebrates — a physiology not wholly medical — 

 and finally to the biological station we confidently look for help in 

 connection with our coast fisheries. This brings me to the last subject 

 which I shall touch upon, a subject closely related both to oceanography 

 and bionomics, and one which depends much for its future advance 

 upon our biological stations — that is the subject of 



AQUICULTURE, 



or industrial ichthyology, the scientific treatment of fishery investiga- 

 tions, a subject to which Professor Mcintosh has first in this country 

 directed the attention of zoologists, and in which he has been guiding 

 us for the last decade by his admirable researches. What chemistry 

 is to the aniline, the alkali, and some other manufactures, marine 

 zoology is to our fishing industries. 



Although zoology has never appealed to popular estimation as a 

 directly useful science having industrial applications in the same way 

 that chemistry and physics have done, and consequently has never had 

 its claims as a subject of technical education sufficiently recognized; 

 still, as we in this section are well aware, our subject has many tech- 

 nical applications to the arts and industries. Biological principles 

 dominate medicine and surgery. Bacteriology, brewing, and many 

 allied subjects are based upon the study of microscopic organisms. 

 Economic entomology is making is value felt in agriculture. Along all 

 these and other lines there is a great future opening up before biology, a 

 future of extended usefulness, of j>opular appreciation, and of value to 

 the nation — and not the least important of these technical applications 

 will, I am convinced, be that of zoology to our fishing industries. 

 When we consider their enormous annual value — about eight millions 

 sterling at first hand to the fisherman, and a great deal more than that 

 sm 95 29 



