758 The American Naturalist. [ September, 
port of good laboratories require large outlays of money, and 
it is chiefly this requirement which calls for endowments of 
Universities far surpassing anything needed but a few years 
ago. But the benefits to mankind derived from such endow- 
ments outweigh, beyond all computation, the money expended 
which, as has been truly said, is “a capital placed at a high 
rate of interest.” 
One sometimes hears the remark, and it is of course true, 
that large endowments, palatial buildings,splendid laboratories 
do not make a University. The breath of life, the vitalizing 
principle, must come from those, both teachers and students, 
who work within their walls. If the phenomena of nature 
could be learned by contemplation and by hearsay, that 
famous University which consisted of a log with Mark Hop- 
kins at one end and thestudent at the other, might exist some- 
where outside of the imagination. But knowledge of nature 
is not to be acquired otherwise than by observation and exper- 
iment, for which the facilities at the end of a log are some- 
what inadequate. The great teachers and investigators are 
likely to be attracted to those Universities where the re 
sources and opportunities for their special work are the most 
ample. 
Laboratories are only workshops; that which is of vital im- 
portance is what is done within them. Provision has been 
made in the Hull Laboratories for the cultivation of all 
departments of what is ordinarily called biology. The domain 
of biology embraces all living things, both vegetable and ani- 
mal. Of vital manifestations it is only some of the mental 
operations and doings of human beings which the biologist at 
present excludes from his survey, and even this self-sacrificing 
curtailment of his province may not be enduring. 
The main directions of biological study relate to the forms 
and anatomical structure, however minute, of living organ- 
isms, to their functions or activities, to their developmental 
history, both individual and ancestral, to their systematic affi- 
nities and classification, and to their distribution over the 
globe in present and in former geological epochs. This vast 
field of study is far more than can be compassed by one man, 
