Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/632

, for the season. These fees fall far short of paying the actual running expenses, and yet every outgo is reduced as far as is compatible with first-class results. So every year the trustees have the problem of meeting the deficiency. So far it has been successfully solved, but it means a continuous struggle. Various plans have been suggested; the most promising is the following: That different colleges and universities endow the private rooms with a hundred dollars a year, and by virtue of this payment have the right to nominate the annual occupant.

Such in outline is the Marine Biological Laboratory as it exists to-day; but it is far from being the institution that its friends



wish it to be. It has developed about as far as possible in the line of a school of instruction, but as a center of investigation there is a chance for enormous growth, and for development in that direction the plans are already well thought out, but as yet the necessary money is lacking.

Only a few years ago, when the student wished to investigate marine life, he must take his laboratory with him and depend for quarters upon a room in a fish-house or the like near the shore. That was the way in which Johannes Müller worked in Europe, and the way in which Agassiz studied on our own coast. Some fifteen or twenty years ago the change began, and sea-side laboratories were erected. The best known of these to-day is the celebrated Zoölogical Station at Naples, established by Dr. Dohrn, to which students flock from every quarter of the world. In its