Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/403

Rh that once was living coral; and the Gulf Stream, that greatest carrier of floating life, flows close to the Tortugas, and the southerly and easterly winds of the summer months constantly drive its dark blue waters upon the islands.

It is on account of these things that the Carnegie Institution of Washington, seeking always to promote research in fields that others can not, or dare not, venture to explore, has established a marine laboratory upon Loggerhead Key, Tortugas. The station is still young, its first season being that of 1905.

The era of finding and naming of animals which had its dawn with Linnæus and its noonday of splendor with the great French naturalists has waned into its dignified decline. Not that systematic zoology will not accomplish much in the future, but the days of its great achievement are in the past.

Therein, indeed, lies the opportunity of the Tortugas laboratory, for a new science has arisen phoenix-like above the ashes of the old. Modern biology is now but little concerned with the naming of dead things, but the study of the living has become of paramount importance. All problems necessitating the study of living animals have been neglected in the tropics, yet there in the pure water of the Gulf Stream one may conduct such experiments with extraordinary success. It is through the study of living animals that science has already discovered truths of incalculable benefit—the control of malaria, yellow fever, and the hook-worm—but a mere beginning has been made in this new science, and, if unrestricted by ill-considered legislation, its future promises far more than its brief past has given us.

As Franklin said when asked the purport of the study of so trivial a set of phenomena as those of frictional electricity—"Of what use is a baby? It may become a man." Who could predict that a reflection of the sun from the windows of the Luxembourg would reveal to Malus the secret of polarized light, and lead ultimately to the most accurate analysis of sugars. It is a reflection upon our lack of confidence that in this age one must still plead for the cause of pure science, for everywhere about us we find practical applications rendered possible only through the previous discovery of their underlying principles by students whose inducement to labor was their love of science, not the hope of financial gain. Thus it was that Henry paved the way for Morse's telegraph, Faraday's classic studies rendered possible the dynamo and electric motor, and the researches of Hertz found their practical application in the development of wireless telegraphy.

Fifty years ago Darwin changed biology into a philosophical science, but it is only recently that it has exhibited decisive evidence of passing out of the qualitative into the quantitative stage of its development.

Thus it is that in these days a marine laboratory is dependent not