METHODS IN PLANKTOLOGY(|! 
GEORGE WILTON FIELD. 
Human existence is dependent upon the oceanic fauna and 
flora far more than is generally suspected. Scientific investi- 
gation has demonstrated a most remarkable biological chain 
and has elucidated the links which connect the lowliest of the 
microscopic plants with the most highly developed mammals. 
In the continual cycle of matter from inorganic to organic, 
from organic to inorganic, with the attendant alternate storing 
up and liberation of energy, are to be found the secrets at the 
basis of life. It is commonly held by biologists that life origi- 
nated in the sea ; and it is in the sea to-day that we find those 
plants and animals which have departed least from the original, 
the ancestral condition, in which life is not complicated by 
diversity of form or function. 
Some of the work carried on by the biological department 
of the Rhode Island Experiment Station has been upon the 
Methods of Studying the Œcology of Marine Organisms, 
since a knowledge of the marine organism is of immense 
importance in understanding the questions connected with the 
fundamental food supply on the earth. 
The number and variety of the animal and vegetable popula- 
tion of the ocean are well-nigh infinite. Any two regions more 
or less remote from each other show differences in their oceanic 
fauna and flora, generally proportional to the distance either 
horizontal or vertical which separates them. The fauna and 
flora of the tropical Caribbean Sea differs widely from that of 
the Arctic oceans ; that of the water south of Cape Cod differs 
markedly from that north of the Cape, though separated only 
by a very few miles of land. The organisms characteristic of the 
surface in any region are wonderfully different from those of 
the abyssal depths. Yet even in the same locality remarkable 
1 Reprinted from the Annual Report of the R. I. Agricultural Experiment 
Station, 1897. 
