8 | ‘ 
Biological Station, ean do a great service to education at this juncture by 
opening up our local natural history to teachers of elementary biology, and 
by making them acquainted in a thoroughly practical way with the most use- 
ful special methods in this field. We seem just now, indeed, in admirable po- 
sition to lead the way along a new line of progress by helping to bring teacher 
and pupil, under favorable conditions, into the presenee of living nature out 
of doors, adding to the methods of the class room and the laboratory of biology 
those of observation, study, and instruction in the field.* 
The art of the fish-culturist is to our waters what the art of agriculture is to 
our tillable lands. Each was in the beginning purely empirical, resting on a 
small store of conmon knowledge gained by the ernde experience of the un- 
educated and the untrained. Agriculture has now been largely placed on a 
scientific foundation, and vigorous efforts are making all over the elvilized, 
world to extend; to decent and to render more exact in every direction our 
acquaintance with the sciences which underlie the practice of this oldest of 
the arts. The development of fish-culture has, however, lingered far behind 
that of its companion subject, compared with which it is indeed still in the 
stage of barbarism. We treat the product of our natural waters with a degree. 
of intelligence and skill scarcely above that which the Indian exhibited in his 
rude attempts at agriculture before the time of Columbus. Our Biological 
Station was founded in part with the hope of helping to do for fish-culture 
what our forty or more agricultural experiment stations are now doing for the 
agriculture of the United States. 
To accomplish these various ends, it was necessary that a subject should be 
chosen and that a location should be found offering a suitable field for scien- 
tific research of a kind to reward the skilled investigation with results of scien- 
tific value, and that these results should also interest a larger public than that 
which is prepared to appreciate and to utilize purely technical work. It was 
essential that this location should be readily accessible from the University, 
and that it should be attractive, comfortable, and convenient as a center of 
operations for visiting investigators and for general and elementary students 
of our field biology. The purposed relation to fish-éulture of course required 
that it should be on or near some lake or stream, or, better still, on some sys- 
tem of waters including both lakes and streams in large variety and in close 
proximity. After a careful study of the University environment, I selected 
in 1894 the Illinois River and its dependent waters as our general field, and 
the vicinity of Havana, in Mason county, as the principal seat of our opera- 
tions. Our two years’ experience here has served only to confirm our first” 
impression, that a very suitable and, indeed, highly fortunate selection had | 
been made. eh 
* aN genuine field-work summer school would be as far ahead of laboratory work for 
teachers—the class who are wrestling with nature study in the grades—as the laboratory is. 
ahead of the old-fashioned text book. It would bea cup advance upon anything ever at-_ 
pomptes: so far as I: know, in Shs country.—_ WILBUR S. JACKMAN. hy 
