Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/526

522 the Columbian Field Museum, and especially of the New York Botanical Garden, have recently made extensive collections in the continental and Antillean portions of the American tropics. But facilities have been lacking for working out the life-histories or the physiology and ecology of tropical and subtropical seaweeds, as this has been done at Naples and Ceylon; the chance has been wanting to select, study and carefully preserve developmental stages of tropical mosses, ferns and seed plants, and to make investigations of the physiology of growth, nutrition and other activities of plants near the equator, as these have been made at Buitenzorg. This sort of opportunity for studying tropical plants where they must be studied—in their tropical surroundings—has seldom been offered to American investigators until within the last decade. The more or less temporary summer laboratories established in the western tropics have been located directly upon the seacoast, primarily with a view to their fitness for zoological work. They have usually proved unattractive to botanists engaged in studies other than those upon marine algae. This has been largely true of the summer laboratories established by the Johns Hopkins University in the Bahamas and Jamaica, by Harvard University in Bermuda and by the Carnegie Institution on the Dry Tortugas. It is evident, therefore, that for many kinds of botanical research a laboratory must be established at a site selected with these in view—in other words, it must be primarily a botanical station.

A serious attempt to arrange for the establishment of an American tropical laboratory was made by certain of the botanists of this country in 1897. The desirability of such a laboratory was pointed out by The Botanical Gazette, and a commission composed of D. T. MacDougal, D. H. Campbell, J. M. Coulter and W. G. Farlow was chosen to select a site. This Tropical Laboratory Commission, after profiting by such information and suggestions as they could obtain, and after two of its members, Drs. MacDougal and Campbell, had visited Jamaica in 1897, was inclined to favor that island as the location for the laboratory. During the presence of these two commissioners in Jamaica they were aided by Hon. William Fawcett, late director of Public Gardens and Plantations, William Harris, superintendent of Public Gardens and Plantations and Professor James E. Humphrey, of the Johns Hopkins University, who was at this time in charge of the Johns Hopkins Laboratory, established at Port Antonio. The sad fate of Professor Humphrey and of that promising young zoologist Franklin Story Conant, as victims of the unwonted visitation of yellow fever to Jamaica, undoubtedly checked the enthusiasm of many who had been interested in establishing a tropical laboratory. The anticipated encouragement and cooperation were not given to the commission, and, in consequence, the search for a site and all further work on the project were, for the time, abandoned. The project was not again taken up by American botanists or institutions during the following six years.