348 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. | [Vor. XXXIV. 
Hopkins University, and in the Johns Hopkins University Cir- 
cular, from 1880 on, naturalists working at Beaufort will find 
many papers and notes of faunistic interest, in which new 
forms are described or known ones recorded. Among these 
may be mentioned Professor Brooks's papers on “ Meduse” 
(Studies, 1882, 1883); and the lists and notes by Professors 
McMurrich (Actiniz), Osborne (Mollusca), Nachtrieb (echino- 
derms), Jenkins (fishes), collected together under the title 
* Notes on the Fauna of Beaufort, N. C." (Studies, 1887). A 
great many facts of general natural history interest (system- 
atic, distributional, ecological) will also be found scattered 
through the pages of the morphological and embryological 
memoirs which have been appearing since 1880 as the result 
of the work of Professor Brooks and his students at Beaufort. 
At the laboratory of the U. S. Fish Commission, which was 
maintained during the past summer at Beaufort, the various 
species observed were recorded, and specimens preserved for 
the museum collection of the laboratory. It is planned that 
the record of each species shall include mention of the localities 
in which it is fairly abundant, most convenient collecting meth- 
ods, time of year during which breeding goes on, brief natural 
history notes on habits of adult (food, enemies, parasites, rate of 
growth, time and extent of migration, etc.) and on the life his- 
tory (character of eggs, where and how deposited, possibility of 
artificial fertilization, period of embryonic development, charac- 
ter of larva and period of larval development, habitat, food and 
enemies of larva). The economic value of such a knowledge 
of the natural history of the region will be readily understood, 
and it is equally obvious to what an extent it will aid natural- 
ists engaged in the study of the abstruse problems of morpho- 
logical and physiological embryology, of comparative anatomy 
and physiology. Its value in connection with similar results of 
the work at other coast stations, to the study of the variability 
of organisms, may be here alluded to. 
To carry out such a scheme of work for a rich fauna like that 
of Beaufort will require years. An excellent basis has, how- 
ever, been built up, and profitable lines of study marked out by 
the members of the Johns Hopkins Marine Laboratory and by 
