MARINE BIOLOGICAL STATION AT PORT ERIN. 5 
Birkenhead), has added greatly to the exact knowledge 
of both the physical and the biological conditions of the 
North Atlantic. The museum which he has now estab- 
lished at Monaco was inaugurated early in April by such 
an assembly of scientific men interested in the sea as has 
probably never before been gathered together. Official 
representatives of France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, 
Russia and other powers, delegates from all the leading 
academies of the world, along with many other scientific 
men invited personally by the Prince, and including such 
leading authorities as Hensen and Brandt of Kiel, Haeckel 
of Jena, Pettersson of Stockholm, Grassi of Rome, Perrier 
and Delage from Paris, Salensky from St. Petersburg, 
and many others, were united in celebrating the progress 
of Oceanography and in launching an institution unique 
in character and of first-rate importance for science. 
Oceanography—the science of the sea—has for its 
scope the determination of the physical, chemical, and 
biological characters of the oceans of the world, and of 
the causes of those great seasonal variations in the 
microscopic living contents upon which depend man’s 
supply of food from the sea, and the continuance of many 
human industries. There are scarcely any more wide- 
spread phenomena in nature, and probably none of more 
importance to man, than those vast periodic changes in 
the minute organisms of the sea, the causes of which are 
now being sought by oceanographers both on exploring 
vessels and in the laboratories of biological stations and 
universities of all civilised countries. 
If this modern science of the sea has now reached such 
an advanced stage that it can be demonstrated in amuseum 
to the public, it is clearly desirable that it should be 
taught both theoretically and practically in our Univer- 
sities and at Biological Stations. There must be many 
