400 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [VOC XXXII. 
The equipment of the station consists of a house boat or 
floating laboratory, 20 X 60 feet over all, well lighted and venti- 
lated, containing a private laboratory and office, a main labora- 
tory, a storeroom, and a kitchen. In the center of the larger 
laboratory stands a long sink for aquaria, supplied with water 
from an overhead tank. The tables in the laboratories will 
provide working accommodations for twenty persons. A steam 
launch, licensed to carry seventeen passengers, furnishes a con- 
venient means of transit to and from the various collecting 
grounds, and a half-dozen rowboats add to the facilities for 
field operations. The station is supplied with nets and seines 
of various kinds for the collection of fishes and other aquatic 
vertebrates, with a collecting lantern and nets for field work in 
entomology, with a large number of breeding cages for the 
rearing of aquatic larve of insects, with dredges, sieves, dip 
nets, and Birge nets for bottom and shore examinations, and 
with tow nets, plankton nets, pumps, centrifuges, and counting 
machines for the qualitative and quantitative investigation of 
the plankton. The laboratory is also supplied with a number 
of aquaria, a liberal allowance of glassware and reagents, and 
in its more extended summer operations is further furnished 
from the biological laboratories of the university. : 
The library of the State Laboratory of Natural History is 
exceptionally complete in the literature of fresh-water fauna 
and flora, and is available for the use of the biological station. 
The leading monographs and many of the scattered papers 
dealing with the Protozoa, Rotifera, Oligochzeta, Entomostraca, 
and aquatic insects are provided. Systematic and faunistic work 
upon these groups is further facilitated by the large number of 
collections in the possession of the state laboratory from the 
waters of the state and many other parts of the continent. 
Among the collections is a series of named European Ento- 
mostraca sent by eminent specialists (Sars, Schmeil, Lilljeborg, 
and Poppe); these are of great value in unraveling the synon- 
ymy of this group, and in establishing the validity of American 
species or their identity with European forms. They also 
afford a basis for the study of comparative variation in the two 
continents. ; 
